


Empty Grave Epitaphs

by SuperLizard



Category: Cursed (TV 2020), Cursed - Thomas Wheeler
Genre: Abandonment, Abusive Parents, Allergies, Assault, Blood and Gore, Broken Bones, Buried Alive, Coma, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Death Wish, Dehydration, Desperation, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, FebuWhump2021, First Aid, Hurt No Comfort, Imprisonment, Infidelity, Insanity, Jousting, M/M, Magic, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Mpreg, Murder, Near Death, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Paralysis, Poisoning, Possession, Rape, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Sacrifice, Shock, Starvation, Suicide Attempt, Swordfighting, Transmogrification, War, Whump, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:47:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 28
Words: 33,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29027448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperLizard/pseuds/SuperLizard
Summary: Gawain dies.Gawain dies 28 times.Happy February.No individual chapter content warnings, only the tags; everything here is suffering.
Relationships: Gawain | The Green Knight/Original Male Character, Gawain | The Green Knight/The Weeping Monk | Lancelot (Cursed), Red Spear | Guinevere/The Weeping Monk | Lancelot (Cursed)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 12





	1. Mind Control

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kayabiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayabiter/gifts), [Valerin Berenghar (Valerin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valerin/gifts), [Saighin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saighin/gifts).



The vines were wrapped around and within him in a way that might have been invasive, if he wasn't so willing after hours of torture to welcome them into the substance of himself. His wounds, the horrifying result of what was by definition the outrage of his flesh, the violation of his body, opened like red soil, accommodating the relentless push and slide of magic and earth and life. His mouth opened and they flowed down his throat, they pushed inside of him from beneath, and he would have moaned in ecstasy as he felt them feeling him, consuming him. He had died a warrior's death and now his body would become the soil, giving new life to whatever grew from it, his soul becoming part of the endless Green. Oh how he wanted it, more than he had ever wanted anything, with his entire soul. He reached for it.

But his body was reaching for something else. He was moving, sitting, rising. The vines and grasses anchored inside the cavern of his chest, the bowl of his abdomen, the chalice of his skull, and reached out of every part of him to split, wrap, encase him in green. And his encased body was moving, separating itself from the soil and the promise of rest.

No, he wanted to scream, but his throat was full, his vocal chords were grass, his lungs were filled with earth. 

Once standing, whatever power had taken over his body paused, perhaps becoming accustomed to its new form. His form.

No, put me back.

There was no touch of a foreign sentience in his mind, no whisper of the Hidden, no voice at all. Not even a simple, animalistic impulse. Gawain was alone in his head, but his body was full of something else entirely. Something dumb, merciless, and unstoppable.

That something stumbled through the sundered camp, searching until it found a weapon. An ax. Then from the ground, more vines surged up, twisting into the form of a horse. Whatever controlled him now, forced their shared container to mount the arcane beast, then the beast moved under them as if under control of the same force.

Put me back, he cried uselessly. Give me back to the earth. Have I not earned rest? Have I not died? Is it not the natural order of things?

But his cries echoed in the silence of his captive mind. 

The first human settlement his possessed form set upon was rubble and ash within the hour, and every hapless soul had been ripped from their body by the blade of his ax.

The Green Knight had been reborn.


	2. "I Can't Take It Anymore"

Gawain, Knight of the Fey, had become Sir Gawain of the court of Arthur Pendragon. He had settled into it with all the post-traumatic avoidance of a veteran soldier, and had offered his tactical experience and strategic competences to the Round Table, which contained a dwindling number of Fey knights and an ever-increasing number of humans. 

He'd tried not to be a dick about it, he really had, but couldn't live with just Lancelot, Kaze, Perceval, and Galehaut for company. He found every excuse to leave for missions-- adventures, Arthur had whimsically called them, perhaps to minimize the trail of deaths that he tended to leave in his wake-- to the point that the Round Table had snidely started to comment on his probable motivations for being away from court, his promiscuity, and the content of his character. They referred to him as "the Father of Adventure," often in a lewd tone. His status as a pagan among a growing influence of Christians didn't help.

It was suffocating. He only felt a momentary escape when he was alone with Lancelot, whether in either of their chambers or out on an "adventure." The only familiar things left in his life were Lancelot and the spilling of blood.

So when the whispers became open talk that became bald accusations of crimes against crown and kingdom, he hadn't really been surprised. Just last year, three (human) knights had led an army against the King of Wales and slain eighty knights, hundreds of peasants, and countless Fey. But he wasn't chaste and he was willing to bend the truth to achieve a favorable outcome of any situation; and these failings were more important than his service, his loyalty, his skills, his love of his friends. These were more important than his apologies, his corrections, and his tenacity.

And they were somehow far more important than the hypocrisy of those leveling the accusations at him.

So rather than face a trial before those he could no longer lie to himself and call his peers, he said goodbye to the last of his friends and saddled Gringolet Junior for his last "adventure."

Only Lancelot bothered to come to the gate to see him off.

Gawain embraced him and treated him to a long, deep kiss, the fire of which had long gone out.

"I will find you," Lancelot promised. "When I am sure he isn't surrounded by enemies."

"He has chosen to elevate his enemies," he dismissed, "in the hopes they will not raise a hand to him."

"I will find you when our boy is safe," he amended.

Gawain smiled humorlessly. "He is a Christian now, and he is one of them."

Lancelot flinched.

He mounted.

"I will find you," he tried. Simple, quiet, painfully empty.

Gawain's smile vanished. "No. You won't." He nudged the horse with his shins, and was gone.


	3. Imprisonment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gawain returns from the wide world as an idealistic 20-year-old and tries to return to the land of his birth.
> 
> It does not go well.
> 
> Backstory for "What Goes After The Fall"  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/27576637/chapters/67456420

Gawain was in a cell.

This was not an unusual way for him to spend a week at a time, since he'd returned home from Alexandria with knowledge and trauma and worst of all, ideas. Ideas unworthy of a young heir, like all Fey are equals and worthy of self-governance, and goods should be taken from each according to their ability and distributed to each according to their needs, and inheritance is theft from society, and kings are the servants of their people, made legitimate only by mandate of the governed.

That last one in particular got him thrown in the dungeon a lot.

Gawain chuckled at his own pun and tried to ignore the noises his stomach made. His father had declared that since inheritance was a crime, he wouldn't mind not receiving his-- and he'd gladly and very publicly denounced it, which was apparently the wrong thing to do. And since goods should be distributed according to need, his father had decided he didn't need more than bread and water and a wool blanket. 

Which was fine for a few days, but it was nearing the end of the week and he couldn't focus on his own thoughts anymore. His limbs seemed so heavy that moving was a chore. He tried to do so as little as possible, but the ache and the cold from the stone creeping into his body made movement necessary, if only to relieve the pressure on his joints.

He drifted, losing time. He shifted again. It was almost time for the bread, wasn't it? He'd parted out the last loaf, eating it when the sun was high, when it set, and when the moon was high. To prevent pains.

He shuffled the wool blanket around again, trying to tuck as much of himself under it. How long had it been? His mother would convince his father to release him soon, or they would decide he'd had enough, and send him back to his quarters to recover. He would regain his strength, return to court, and try again to teach others. He had convinced the castle staff easily enough, and even some minor lords and ladies. He just needed a few more, and they could overthrow King Lot. Elect a pair of consuls. Establish a senate.

He shivered and leaned to the side, trading pressure points. He wheezed a little, angry at his body. It was dark in the dungeon, what did it matter that his vision was dark on the edges? Nothing to see anyway.

He drifted for a while longer. Now the sun was setting again. Had it been the lunar noon, when he'd eaten? Or the one before?

His stomach cramped, noiseless and angry. It took three days for the sound to stop. No one had been to the dungeon in three days? That didn't seem right. Someone would be along soon. Bread and water. It was almost time for the bread and water, if he could just wait a little longer.

He tried not to think about how dry he was, and instead pushed himself to stand, straightening slowly. He held the blanket around him with one hand and used the other hand to brace on the wall, walking slowly over to the hole in the stone, through which he could see very little but could hear the ocean clearly. The sun was high. It was almost time for water. 

He could almost see the alabaster columns of the temples and libraries in Alexandria, reflecting the sun and accentuating the splendor of the skyline. A city of marvels and learning and progress. Of fountains and beautiful bodies and glorious plenty, where even the slaves had been treated better than the peasants and craftsmen in his father's kingdom. The father that had cast him out like garbage on the day he was born, a leftover of his premarital copulation, as worthy as the afterbirth that accompanied him. A mistake not even worth asking the midwife to correct. Not even worth the ash they would have pressed his infant face into, to smother him and cover their disgrace. No one had expected him to live. Certainly not long enough to need water. It was almost time for the water.

He blinked at the stone of the ceiling. It was dark. There was no moon light anymore. He was very cold, as if there was no more heat left in him, even in the center of him. He distantly noticed how seldom his heart thudded in his ears, how quiet the rush of his blood and the ocean had become. He licked his lips. He felt cold, but then so warm. It was almost time-


	4. Impaled

His near-immortality and rapid healing had unfortunately come to the attention of the enemy, as he knew it eventually would. They had planned for this. If it weren't so painful, he might even be impressed.

Instead, he was hanging on a wall, his toes barely brushing the ground, and blood dripping from his mouth in intermittent little streams, staring with chagrin at the six foot long, double-tipped iron pike that had been driven all the way through him and wedged into a gap between the stones. He was pinned in place like a bug with a shiny black and green carapace. A shiny, angry bug. And like a bug, he couldn't quite get the message that he should be dead from this.

The battle had continued around him and the invading force of raiders had been pushed back and dispatched in the field outside the castle. Shouting to them for help would not have worked, even if shouting didn't force up a bubbling stream of blood, which was _really disgusting_.

He kicked his feet a bit, listening to them slip through his own blood on the stone. Tried humming a little tune to pass the time and distract himself. In the heat of battle, he had tried to shimmy to the other end of the pike to free himself, but the base was much wider than the part of the shaft already driven through him. He supposed that plugged the wound in front quite nicely, but now he was dangling at a bit of an angle, up from the front to the back, which caused the muscles of his back to twist, trying to hold him up and preserve the integrity of his internal organs. Not that there was much of that to preserve.

Gawain blew a blood bubble and popped it with a loud, wet sound. He sighed, also a loud, wet sound. Looked up at the ceiling. Down at the stone-- _nope, don't look there, that's disgusting_ \-- across the gate arch to the opposite wall. How long could a battle possibly take? 

He supposed being run through probably made time seem longer than it really was. He should dedicate this waiting time to thinking up how he would tell this story to Percival's future romantic interests. He would have to make it as embarrassing as possible. _Remember the time your dear old dad got stuck on a pike like a speared fish? Get it? Because a pike is a_ \-- no, that was terrible.

The blood loss was making him giddy. Yes, surely it was the fault of blood loss. His puns were never this bad, were they? 

He reflexively swallowed to clear the gore out of his throat, but there was nowhere to go, and the motion only forced his esophagus to press against the spear. A spike of pain ran through him--

 _Haha, yes, spike of pain. Ran through. Still got it,_ he thought triumphantly as his vision finally started to fade.

He came to again with a jolt as the pike shook, jarring his insides around and wringing a bloody exhalation from him. Someone was under his left arm, and someone else under his right, and they were lifting him so his weight wasn't on the pike shaft anymore. Somewhere behind him was a frantic, rhythmic chopping.

"There you are, almost loose," a voice behind him promised, less edged with panic than he really hoped it would be at the sight of his predicament. 

_I get no respect_ , he thought. _No concern_. But what he said aloud was, "Hhhrrfff."

The pike was cut loose from the wall, and his weight fell entirely against his two helpers, the pike shaft still hanging from his body. The person behind him, unceremoniously and without informing of his intent, pushed the pike out from behind him.

The pressure left him in a wave of relief and black blood, and he sagged forward, passing out again. Would this be enough, he wondered. Had he finally lost enough blood to pass on to the Green, the sweet release of death?

\--

 _Nope. Fuck._ He opened his eyes again to a pristine room and a soft bed and roaring hearth, cold winter sunlight streaming through the window. Lancelot was sitting on the bed next to him, doing… something with yarn. Gawain didn't know the word for it.

He inhaled, feeling the newness of his healed body pulling against itself, relearning how his pieces fit together. Exhaled. Inhaled. Tried. "Laa-- mm." _Ow_.

Lancelot looked down at him, dark smudges under his eyes. "Awake. Good."

"Are… are you looking… looking after me?" He managed in several shallow breaths. He was hurt and he wanted to be comforted, for someone to say a soft thing to him and hold his hand.

"Yes," Lancelot replied, and for a moment Gawain hoped he would go on. Then the taciturn bastard shifted down into the bed and threw his yarn-craft to the side. "You're finally awake, which means you're out of danger and I can get some sleep."

Gawain's heart made a little injured sound, but his body wasn't able to translate it into a physical noise. Instead, he exhaled harshly and lay still as Lancelot tucked himself under the blankets and immediately fell asleep, leaving him effectively alone in the room. He sighed and looked at the pitcher of water on the table near the bed, then back at the mess of curls on the pillow next to him. _Well. It won't kill me to wait,_ he decided, and tried to breathe in a little of the peace Lancelot exhaled.


	5. "Take Me Instead"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Rape

Gawain was tied to the chair, his hands together behind his back, his wrists to his ankles, the whole knot fastened to the back of the frame. His knees pressed painfully into the hard edge of the chair, but if he let himself pitch forward, the chair would come down on top of him. They hadn't bothered to gag him after this round, hoping that any sound he made would cause distress to the occupant of the wooden trunk on the other side of the tent.

There wasn't far for him to go without control of his legs anyway. But maybe he could get to the trunk. Undo the latch. Free the boy.

Gritting his teeth, he leaned forward. It was not enough to shift the chair. He swung the weight of his torso back, then forward again, earning a tantalizing tip forward, but the chair settled back on all four legs again. He muttered wordless disapproval. He would have to try faster, combine the momentum of multiple lunges--

On the third swing forward, the chair finally surrendered and dumped him forward. The impact on the burns was painful enough to make the edges of his vision darken for a moment, and he was certain he made a sound, but when he collected himself again there was no noise but the sound of his own laboured breathing. The fluid in his chest shifted, and for a few moments he felt his heart strain against it. 

He rolled onto his right side, and it burned its way accordingly down, and it became even harder to breathe. No matter; he didn't have far to go or much to do before it killed him, and really he would rather his heart stop before the man with no eyes came back to continue.

But not before he freed the boy.

He curled on himself, pulling his useless legs and the dead weight of the chair forward, yanking his arms backwards. Then he set his hip into the ground, balanced his weight there, and stretched out, inching forward. He set his shoulder in the dirt and balanced there, pulled his hips up again, and repeated the action. Again. His heart hammered and his breathing came implausibly fast for a few moments, and the world tilted wildly.

'No, not yet.' He bit down on his lip and forced himself another inch forward. Wheezed. Curled. Stretched. 

His head bumped into the chest, and he exhaled in relief. He looked at the latch from below and considered how to unlock it. Once he had, he hoped the boy was strong enough to open the lid on his own. Hidden, he was so quiet in there. He hoped he wasn't dead.

Pushing the panic out of his mind for the moment, he concentrated on the task at hand. It was a simple enough latch, a hook through a half loop. If he could get any part of himself up high enough-- just a handful of inches-- he could push the hook out. But the few inches may as well be a thousand leagues, with his limbs tied.

He bent upward, curled against his broken ribs, teeth crushed together against a scream. It wasn't enough. He fell back with a whimper.

Footsteps outside the tent. Inside the tent. Behind him. He was discovered. He forced the darkness back by power of will and squinted up at the man who had entered. A lone paladin stood before him, startled and frozen, unfastening his belt.

He'd heard rumors of what the churchmen did to little boys. It didn't take all of his failing mind to connect the rumors with the nervous paladin in front of him, hand tucked in his red robe and a caught look on his face.

Tied to a chair, legs dead weight, lung crushed and bleeding, and one eye plucked out of his head, Gawain was the image of powerlessness. 

And that's exactly what people who preyed on children wanted. Powerlessness.

The decision was made in an instant. Before the paladin could raise the alarm, Gawain let his face fall against the ground, his good eye displaying fear and hopelessness. He let himself tear up, let himself deflate and whimper pitifully. 'You've caught me,' his body said. He shrunk back against the chest. 'It's me you want, and you've caught me.'

The paladin's eyes fixed on him. He continued unfastening his belt, pulling his robes aside. Slowly at first, then faster as he saw Gawain's eye widen in faked realization. He dared to smile, to grin.

Gawain let him crowd close over him, unfastening his hands from the chair and seizing him by the throat, yanking him up to kneel on ruined legs. He pressed back against the chest, pressed as much of his body as he could against it, so that-- yes-- when the paladin lifted him by his throat and forced the bulk of his weight onto the top of the chest, the fabric of his ruined shirt caught on the hook, dragged it from the loop. 

The paladin leered at him and muttered low and rank. "I was thinking to have some fun with the little one, but how often would I get the chance to stick it in a Fey knight?" 

Gawain tried to pretend to be surprised and horrified. He let out a low moan. 'That's right. Take me instead.'

The paladin forced him onto his belly, forced his trousers down, and as he began to bounce him against the wooden chest, he prayed the boy was unconscious but alive, that he would wait until it was over to try to escape. Then, as he felt the pressure in his chest build and the field of his vision narrow, then close, he hoped they would take him somewhere else, so the boy wouldn't have to see his defiled body.

He had so many hopes, that when his heartbeat stopped, the first thing he noticed wasn't its absence, but the incredible sudden peace.


	6. Insomnia

There were too few fighters. He needed more Fey to be willing to take up a weapon. Traders and crafters and farmers refused. Mothers and children and elderly and youth. He had-- ironically-- been able to secure all the swords and bows and axes and glaives and spears he could wish for, but no one wanted to wield them, because  _ murder is wrong _ .

They had no idea what was coming. He argued with village leaders and elders and even with random Fey in every village until they drove him out for being  _ disruptive _ . Unruly. Impolite. He couldn't get through to anyone, and then the church would come down on them like an avalanche and he would spend days collecting the survivors and mending the wounded, and they would all say the same thing.

"Why didn't you warn us?"

He lay awake at night and remembered the hairshirt-clad cultists that came out of the desert, thin and wiry, glassy-eyed and unwashed, and set upon villages and towns and pushed down the statues and shrines and burned the libraries, singing hymns and welcoming the bullies and killers who had always been there. Town to town, screaming about God's will while stealing and raping and murdering. 

On to the next village, to warn them. But of course none would believe him. Life had always been comfortable in this village and none had ever bothered them. They never bothered anyone. They never meddled in politics or religion. They were peaceful farmers. Or fishermen. Or miners. Or blacksmiths. Or masons. Or weavers. No one could want to harm them, that would be ridiculous.

So he would be driven out of town as  _ disruptive _ , a troublemaker, him and the growing number of refugees who came with empty hands behind him, and haunted eyes that made people uncomfortable. As if making people face uncomfortable facts were somehow a crime worse than genocide. And then a week later, they would be the refugees, hiding behind his shield arm.

He moved from Rome to Alexandria to Persia to Gaul to Britannia, a few steps ahead of the church. The refugees that hid behind him would toil and craft and provide for each other the best they could, but so few would pick up a blade or lock shields with him because  _ murder is wrong. _

He lay awake and thought in circles. How to convince the next village. How to recruit more warriors. How to get through to the traumatized and unwilling. The dark ages were beginning. The ignorance and hate of the stupid and the violent and the religious would crush all of the progress the wide world had made, if no one would resist them. And no one would, because  _ murder is wrong. _

So he was wrong. And if he was wrong, why were there so many souls under his care? And if he was so wrong, why did they celebrate him? Why give him an epithet and their trust, if he were just a murderer? Was it the hope that they could keep their hands free of blood? Was it cowardice? Was the whole world covered over by cowards?

He lay awake until dawn, and then he rose again and fought for the living, until his memory dwindled to minutes and he couldn't remember what day it was or what village they were going to next. Until the faces ran together and he couldn't concentrate on voices or plans.

Until Kaze put a hand on his shoulder and frowned in concern, leaned in close. "You should sleep," she told him, as if he didn't know.

He laughed, but it was more like a sob. "I can't. I'm a murderer, you see." He laughed and laughed. And then he cried.

And she led him out of the strategy circle. And really, how dare he. He was being  _ disruptive _ . He laughed. Someone should have warned them.


	7. Poisoning

Gawain sat under a tree and took a pull from a water skin. Kaze had taken over, drilling the new recruits mercilessly in footwork and form. His head pounded in time with her orders. 

He drank a little much last night, and this was certainly his punishment for it. They'd come across-- of all things-- a town friendly to the fey and the fey cause. He had gone to the keep to negotiate trade and silence from the lord of the small city, and been treated very hospitably, with food and wine aplenty. He'd come away with an agreement that none would speak of the fey camping in the woods, and they could trade crafted goods for grain and textiles. They'd celebrated in the tavern until the wee hours of the morning, drinking the sweet honey wine from the local countryside and losing plenty of coin in games of dice and cards. Soft diplomacy, he liked to call it.

And his diplomacy had earned him an incredible headache. He could hardly breathe for the way his stomach turned.

When Kaze called for a break, she came over to inspect him with a wry smirk. "You are too old to not know your limits, soldier."

"Hm," he agreed, squinting balefully in her direction. "Did you come over here just to make it worse?"

Her smirk turned into a mild frown. She crouched in front of him and searched his eyes. "Are you still drunk?" 

"I wish I were," he groaned. He huffed shortly and pushed himself up, but the world tilted unfairly under him and he felt the ground come up against his side to support him. 

Kaze's hand moved to his throat, searching for his pulse. She cursed and whistled loudly over her shoulder, gesturing to one of the recruits. 

The cliffwalker man-- a boy, really, but a broad-shouldered one-- obediently approached without comment.

"I will take him to Polly. Have the others continue on footwork after the break. Fifty advances, fifty retreats, and fifty lunges. Then you earn your supper digging the latrine ditch."

He frowned but did not offer any concerns, turning to do as he was told.

Kaze pulled Gawain to sit, then slipped an arm under his shoulder and around his back. "We're going to stand and walk. All you have to do is lean on me, then put one foot in front of the other."

Gawain groaned softly. "What is happening?"

"You've been poisoned. We're going to Polly before it gets any worse." She didn't sound concerned.

He took that as a good sign. He forced his legs to straighten, then threw an arm around her shoulders in turn. As they stumbled together, he found it easier if he ignored the evidence of his inner ear and trusted Kaze's shoulders to define concepts like 'up' and 'down.' It was slow going, and they had to stop once for him to retch bile.

Polly scowled as they entered the tent. "I don't have any hangover remedy. This is a hospital, not an apothecary."

"It's poison," Kaze informed her bluntly, pushing Gawain onto a straw mattress and getting to work untying his paldron. "Cyanide. I have seen this before."

She raised an eyebrow. "When was he poisoned?"

"At the parley," Gawain told in short breaths. "Last night."

"Then you went drinking, came back here, passed out, and did a morning of training?" Polly asked with a quirked brow, but she was already moving to dig through a wooden chest of bottles and herbs.

He wheezed in agreement.

"Honey wine delayed the onset of symptoms," she reasoned. "Cyanide does seem likely. You have seen this before, Sir Kaze?"

She nodded sharply, undoing his sword belt and placing the scabbard aside. "A popular mode of assassination. Apple pips are plentiful and easy to get without suspicion."

Polly approached with a bottle of some thick, amber liquid with leaves floating in it. "Drink as much as you can without vomiting. If you vomit, start again."

Kaze uncorked it, forced Gawain's mouth open, and tipped the contents in without warning.

Gawain flailed a bit, trying to take it from her and dutifully trying to balance swallowing and breathing at the same time. He tipped precariously to one side, but Polly pushed him upright and held him there. When he waved for mercy and choked, Kaze relented. "Hrk-- what--?"

"Burdock, dandelion, and honey," Polly explained. The sugar will help you pass the poison, if you can."

His eyebrows shot up. "If--?"

"Your body was doing a fine job until it wasn't anymore," she explained gently. "You need to take as much sugar as you can, while you still can. It's going to hurt."

He took as deep breaths as he could manage, then nodded to Kaze again and cooperated as best he could. At least his heart wasn't pounding as hard as it had been on the training grounds. But now it felt like heat was evaporating from his skin, from his bones. He whimpered and gestured for a respite from the honey as he began to shiver convulsively. "I can't--" he started.

Whatever he was going to say was cut off and Kaze tossed the bottle aside and forced him onto his back. She forced his sword belt between his teeth just as his jaw locked shut and his eyes rolled back, his spine curling and limbs thrashing. 

Polly began counting out loud, retrieving another bottle of honey from the supplies and adding crushed yellow wort flowers, corking it and tipping it first one way, then the other. 

As Gawain's muscles relaxed and his teeth unclenched, Kaze removed the belt, grabbed his armor by the collar, and hauled him up to sit again.

He made a confused sound, his eyes open but unfocused, and looked around the tent. 

Kaze stood in front of him and held him upright. "You are in the healers' tent. You have been poisoned. You will drink what Polly gives you."

He blinked through his confusion and nodded, not understanding but trusting them completely. He did as he was told.

"He's getting cold," Polly observed, testing his hand with hers. She stepped to the door of the tent and shouted for an assistant to gather warm stones from the fire pit. When she returned, she snatched wool blankets from other unoccupied sickbeds and threw them onto the mattress behind him, spreading them out. She untied his chest plate and unlaced it completely, peeling it away just in time for his eyes to roll back again and Kaze to push him down onto the blankets.

He jerked and spasmed, muscles twisting in on themselves and pulling his limbs in unnatural directions. Kaze held the belt in his mouth and counted out loud. 

When it was over, he did not open his eyes.

"Thirty-five count," she reported to Polly, who was receiving a bucket of stones and directing the assistant to stand and wait.

"He's probably out," she replied unhappily. "These will keep him warm while his liver works through it."

They tucked the warm stones between the mattress and the wool blankets, then spread another blanket over him. He lay as still and pale as death, his eyes cracked slightly open and staring.

Kaze studied him uneasily. "Are his eyes supposed to be open like that?"

Polly shrugged. "For some, it's like that. Some even sleep that way."

"Is there anything else we can do?"

The faun healer looked pensive for a moment, thinking back through her training. "No. Well. Keep him warm. If his heart stops, try to start it again. Clean up and keep his secret if he soils himself."

Kaze frowned.

Polly shrugged one shoulder again. "Healing is not glorious work. Usually, it's just disgusting."

"Like battle," Kaze decided.

"Yes," she agreed. "But with vastly different goals."

She snorted.

-

Gawain lay still and pale for an entire day. His guardians did not reveal to anyone, even him, if he soiled himself as predicted. But he did wake eventually, cocooned in blankets on a bed of fire-warm stone, weak as a day-old kitten.

He wheezed and let his head fall to the side, catching Kaze's attention. "He… he lied." 

Kaze nodded. 

"We… have to leave… might tell where… where we are…"

She nodded again. "I've made arrangements. The camp is packing up. Everyone is accounted for, even those who visited the town."

"Have to… go now…" he slipped a hand out of the blankets and tried to catch her arm, to convey how urgent it was.

She smiled, incongruously soft, an expression reserved for instances of privacy. She caught his searching hand and squeezed it. "We will leave under cover of night."

"H...how long?"

"It is an hour til sunset. You fainted at training this morning."

He groaned quietly. "N...never take me seriously... again, will they." He tried for a smile but it looked like a grimace.

She chuckled and squeezed his hand again, then tucked it back under the blankets. "Bold of you to assume they took you seriously before. You must rest. Tonight will be unpleasant."

He groaned again, softly, as his eyelids dipped. "I… really wanted…"

Kaze frowned and leaned in to catch the rest of his words.

"...wanted to trust… them…"

She pursed her lips and patted him on the shoulder gently. "I know," she told him. "I did, too."

He sighed let his weariness win, pulling him down into sleep.

Kaze found Polly outside of the tent, directing the strike of supplies and tents into the waiting carts. "He awoke for a few moments. He was lucid."

She nodded, relieved. "He is out of danger, then."

"You will look after him. If I do not return, you will put him on a cart and direct the camp to leave without me."

Polly opened her mouth to object, but there was something about the way Kaze's left hand was wrapped around the hilt of her sword, the tension in her jaw, and the merciless cold flame behind her gaze. The faun nodded, objections dying away. "I understand. Happy hunting."


	8. Alt - Truth Serum

Being sent by the Roman Emperor himself to fight a duel in Persia, with an entire legion as an escort, had its perks, especially enjoyable for a seventeen-year-old Sky Man. Among them, he had an extremely comfortable cabin to himself in one of the most technologically advanced ships in the world. He had plenty to eat and drink, the finest sword he had ever laid eyes on, and truly splendid armor, shining with iron and boiled leather on the outside, supple, oiled lambskin on the inside. A shield broad and strong, laminated iron and wood and padded. Even his fine sword's sheath was buttery smooth. 

They sent women and young men to his cabin to entertain him, and he did his best to get behind their service-face and learn their names and situations. Those who were there because they were bade to be, he allowed to talk and game amongst themselves, to drink and be merry without worrying over him. He spoke to them of republics and rights and equality. 

Those who became truly intrigued by him, who pressed the case to take pleasure by him even after he gave them leave to do as they pleased, he did his best to pleasure them, and accepted whatever they wished to do to his body. He was, after all, down to the bone, a creature of service himself.

When the ship docked at the port of Damascus and deposited an entire legion to the inns of the city, a satisfied, relaxed, sexed-out Gawain felt no danger at all when veiled strangers appeared at his door with wine and sweet words. He welcomed them without concerns or suspicions. 

A wiser person would have at least been a little bit suspicious.

Wait, did he say that out loud?

"It's alright, pale boy," one of the women reassured him, lounging across his lap with a stem of grapes resting on her breasts. "You can say whatever it pleases you to say."

What had he been saying?

"About the general, I think," the woman stretched out on his bed prompted. She rolled onto her belly and pulled her arms up, to prop her chin on her hands. "About how he doesn't know how to fight."

With a creeping feeling, he realized he wasn't in total control of what he was saying. The words came out as soon as his thoughts formed-- sooner, somehow. 

So he would have to control what he was thinking. That made total sense.

Triumphantly, he took a moment to duck his chin and take a grape in his teeth, laying a hand across the silk-covered waist of his companion for the evening. What was her name?

"It doesn't matter," she giggled. "I forgot my name."

That sounds a lot like the time he'd gotten so shit-faced with the consul of Alexandria that they couldn't remember how to get home.

"But what did the consul know about Persia?"

Damned if he could remember. They were both very drunk at the time, you see.

His lap cat damsel pouted at him and draped her head back, pushing her breasts towards his face. They were very nice breasts. He was more of an ass man, himself.

They both sighed at him and their smiles became strained.

"What do you think of General Lucan?" The woman on the bed kicked her feet daintily. "I heard he has two thousand men in his command."

He has about as many as Gawain's father.

"Oh? And who is your father, pale boy?"

His father was a right cunt. Threw his pregnant sister from a tower. Threw him away like trash the day he was born. Treats his people like slaves. Controls his mother by keeping her with child and locked up. His father is the worst person alive.

The room got very quiet and very uncomfortable.

The woman on his lap sat up, confused, as he broke down and began to weep furious tears. She looked over at her partner on the bed and shrugged helplessly.

"But what about the emperor?"

What about the bloody emperor! The Christians were crawling out of the rocks in the desert and coming for them all, every stone of every temple and every page of every book, and the emperors of Rome and Persia wanted to compare dicks instead of fighting the real enemy. 

The woman in his lap shifted to sit on the arm of the chair and awkwardly wrapped her arms around him, patted him on the back as he wept.

He would fight and die because that's all he would be allowed to do to help his people, and it would amount to nothing. Ultimately, the Christians would wipe out anything too different, Saracen and pagan alike, and what did it even matter, the whole world was cursed.

It felt like as good a time as any, with his inhibitions gone, to open up his fears and unpack some of his trauma, so he did. It overpowered the suggestions they tried to give him, the leading questions and prompts and seductions. Whatever they had given him to make him truthful and susceptible had that effect, down to the letter. The armor he built around his heart, brittle and hard, fell away, and he told them of his buried dream of becoming a healer, of studying under the finest surgeons, of helping people with his hands instead of hurting them. Of mending broken bones instead of breaking sieges. Of relieving pain instead of inflicting it. Of helping mothers bring forth sons and daughters instead of leaving sons and daughters dead on the battlefield for mothers to bury and mourn.

His heart split in half and described the flesh markets in Rome, the poverty he'd seen there, and the way humans treated each other with cruelty when they had no need to be cruel. Of the wastelands outside Veii, where the slag was dumped and flowed into the river, and the livestock were born with too many heads and not enough legs. Of the smell of bilge and rotten flesh on the ship from Britannia, and the leers of sailors who would use any undefended body. 

By the end, he was sobbing and the woman who had come for information was petting his hair, murmuring comfort to him in a language he didn't know. Her partner wasn't asking questions anymore, having traded words for empathetic hums and exclamations. Together, they coaxed him into the bed and lay on either side of him until he sobbed himself to sleep.

When he awoke to a legionnaire pounding on his door, he was alone, exhausted, and his mouth was as dry as the desert ahead of them, but he knew he hadn't told them anything of strategic significance. He lay for a moment longer, savoring the memory of their soft arms around him, and the comfort they gave, more kind than the entertainment given him on the ship. His heart felt lighter for his confessions; maybe it would make him faster in the duel to come. Maybe he would pass into the Twilight with a little less grief dragging at his heels.


	9. Buried alive

The Twilight was supposed to be peaceful. The first moments of it had been, at least comparatively. He felt the echoes of his misused body, but only distantly. The sun seemed to be setting and rising all at once, or there were two suns? The forest around him was golden and red, maples in autumn, a hallucination of color and brilliance. The river at his feet was pleasantly cool, and it flowed over him, around him, past him, beckoning him to dive in and swim with the current and see what was on the other side. He marvelled at the way the water sounded like gentle laughter and sleepy sighs, murmured words of comfort that he didn't understand with his mind, but with his soul. He leaned forward, roughy his hands forward to dive in--

A piercing impact like a harpoon drove through his side, too close to the spine. A familiar wound. How had it followed him to this place? 

He panicked and tried to throw himself into the river, but whatever had a hold on him through that wound jerked him back roughly, slammed him onto the ground. The soil of the riverbank opened and fell away, splitting in two. The ground swallowed him up as he shouted and clawed and begged for the river. The earth closed over him.

The pull in his side gentled to a persistent tug. The press of the soil wasn't overwhelming or even uncomfortable, but it was inexorable. He struggled, but couldn't move. He couldn't breathe, but he didn't need to.

The gentle murmuring of the river was gone, and his heart broke for missing it. There was no sound at all in this grave; not his breathing, not his heartbeat, not the movement of air or the ambient sound of the world or even the ringing noise that ears sometimes provided to occupy themselves when there was no real sound to hear. He tried to speak, but couldn't move his face. He tried to hum, but there was no sound. 

He tried to scream.

Time stopped, and his perception of time floundered in the void it left behind. When had he died? Had he been dead for long? How long would he be buried? How long would he be aware that he was dead? 

Why was this happening? Perhaps the Twilight was too full of fey souls. Were all the ones he'd failed to save from the fire and the sword somewhere in the earth now, too? Waiting for the river to flow freely again, so they could all be swept away?

Had he been abandoned by his ancestors when severed from them? First when he was an infant and again when they were denied to him, when he sought them again as a young man? He was supposed to see them in the Twilight. They were supposed to welcome him. Maybe they didn't know him.

Perhaps this was time to contemplate what he had done in his life, or left undone. What had he done that could be bad enough to deny him the Twilight? Had he failed too often or too hard or once in the most important instance? When he failed to save his family from the enemy?

His thoughts stretched thin across the vacuum left behind by time and space, until they were so thin that they disappeared. He wasn't anyone anymore. He was relieved of the burden of having a past or an identity. Within the embrace of the soil, he felt more and more at home.

A blink or a thousand years later, something tugged at his side. He stretched out his roots, forcing into the tiny cracks of the soil, pushing himself into the cracks to force the stones apart, shrank, divided, flowed. He was a part of the expansive consciousness of the soil, silent, teeming. He broke through to noise and light and the passage of time. He felt himself pushing up a stem, opening a single leaf, testing the air. Finding it fresh and good, he stretched up, pushing more leaves, growing solid and wide and tall. His bark was as hard as armor and moisture flowed through his heartwood from the lowest root to the highest leaf. And all was *good.*

Except for the tugging, which didn't stop. As his center breached the surface and rose with his reborn form, he felt it pull harder, a sharp barb left from a past life. The noise around him grew louder and time seemed to pass more quickly, the harder it pulled. He shifted in a way trees should not, and it pulled his roots free. He groaned in protest. A flash of unnatural light and fire shattered him, throwing shards of wood clear, severing his limbs. He lay uprooted and vulnerable on the ground, and he screamed.

Hands held onto him, gathered him up. He felt the last of the vines of green wood coil protectively around his hurts, sprouting and knitting him together. He opened, and air poured in, cold and wrong in the cracks of what had never opened before. It came out of him with a sharp sound. The hands on him shifted, brushing against his…

Face? He had a face? Trees shouldn't have faces.

The light and shadow around him took form and color. He blinked around an… eye. He blinked an eye. This vision resolved, but he didn't understand what he was seeing. He was uprooted. He should be dead soon. Everything was happening so fast. Everything was so loud.

He swayed gently, remembering a river he had been so desperate to dip his roots into. Something loud and insistent was hammering inside him, trying to get out. He put a… hand… on it. Could he free it if he tried? 

He tried.

The noise got louder instantly. 

He stopped, studied the creature in front of him. Was it part of him or part of his ecosystem somehow? It felt familiar, like the brush of a fungal network across his roots as it traversed the earth. He reached out and intercepted the hands on his face, brought them in front of his eye so he could inspect them. The tiny branches were smaller than his, but longer. The palms were narrow and scarred. The skin was pale and warm, so warm.

The noise seemed to die away, the voices stopping. 

He released the hands and caught his balance on his own. How could he be pointed upright again if he had been uprooted? Another mystery. He examined the creature attached to the hands and found it to be pale and red and blue. The blue was some kind of petals maybe. A commensal plant of his? Something which grew from the same soil. 

Another creature stood over them, clutching a wooden staff. It made him nervous. Did the creature kill regularly to create tools like that?

The creatures faced each other for a moment, then him. Then his commensal flower turned back to him, and he faced it, and felt at peace. If it was growing here near him, then he had done a good job of being a tree, and falling would be an acceptable end. He could decay.

Then the creature's face opened and it made a sound. 

"Gawain?" Nimue asked tentatively.

His reality exploded.


	10. "I'm Sorry. I Didn't Know."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Backstory for "What Comes After the Fall"  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/27576637/chapters/67456420

Gawain was 17 years old. The legion sent with him as an escort had celebrated his victory against the Persian champion by running out of the desert as fast as they could, leaving him to the enraged crowd. They had beaten him thoroughly, and worse. He would have died in the powder sand, if Kaze hadn't waited until night and retrieved his battered form. She brought him into Damascus on a wooden drag out of the kindness of her heart and admiration for his skull with a sword. Her coin and good name bought him attention from the finest surgeon in the city and his two assistants. They cleaned and wrapped his wounds, set his bones, stitched his flesh. 

As soon as he could be safely strapped to a camel, Kaze negotiated their passage on a caravan to Alexandria. She wanted them in a place where she had more allies to protect them from the thousands of enemies Gawain had earned for himself, in both Persia and Rome. He was hardly in a condition to argue, being completely at her mercy. Whenever he asked her why she bothered with him, she would tell him the same thing.

"The end of the world is coming. I want fey like you at my side."

So he shut his mouth, held his insecurities close, and suffered bravely all the way to Alexandria. When they arrived, she had to cut him loose from the saddle and move him to a stretcher. They were met by a handful of Kaze's allies. They spoke quickly amongst themselves in a language he couldn't understand, and then two of the strangers-- new friends?-- carried him away without telling him where they were going.

They took him to a stone-walled compound, through a courtyard, and into a dimly-lit room, where they told him nothing and left him alone. He lay there for a moment and tried to catch his breath, feeling incongruously cold after a long ride in the desert.

And then a wooden door opened, and the sun came out, and for the first time since he left home, Gawain felt it warm him.

A man he knew by reputation and rare pieces of his work, this doctor was the North Star. The meteor. The beacon that had drawn Gawain onto the ship and away from everything he had known.

"Galen," he breathed, star-struck. He had imagined this moment hundreds of times, but none of them had included being the patient on the table before him.

Galen spared a moment and a raised eyebrow, but didn't answer him. Instead, he gestured to his assistants and began giving orders in Greek, which Gawain barely understood. The assistants cut away what was left of his clothes and threw them into a corner. Galen moved to the side of the table and inspected his wounds, turning his arm one way, then the other. His hands were warm and certain, everything he'd thought they'd be.

Not that Gawain had spent an abundance of time thinking about how the famous surgeon's hands would feel. No, sir. He definitely hadn't had a charcoal drawing of him, copied from a book, itself copied from a scroll. And he absolutely had not been sad to lose it in Athens.

He had to say something. This might be his last chance. He licked his cracked lips, summoned his courage. "I've read every report of your work that made it into Britannia."

Galen snorted, and replied in perfect Latin. "I am more surprised that you can read, than that reports have made it that far." He nodded to an assistant to bring a roll of tools, from which he selected a serrated knife. "But I am most surprised of all that you have been beaten so thoroughly and not died of shock. You didn't do this just to meet me, I hope?"

Gawain chuckled, the sound pained and limited by his broken ribs. He watched with great interest as Galen's assistant peeled back the skin at the edge of a slice on his arm, and Galen used the serrated knife to cut away dead tissue from the edge. "No. I angered half of Persia for my own benefit."

Galen didn't look away from his work, but he did smirk. "And what business does a man from so far away have, angering a nation in our storied part of the world?"

Gawain continued to watch as the knife was set aside in favor of needle and thread. "The freedom of the fey."

Galen didn't stop sewing, but he did bark something in Greek. The assistants immediately set down the tools they'd been holding and left the room. When the door closed behind them, Galen spoke again more quietly, but still with the amused tone of a predator standing over prey. "You must really not care whether you live or die. And did you get what you came for, in Persia?"

"I did."

The surgeon paused and finally looked upon his face. He seemed surprised.

"I fought the giant Gormandius in single combat as the Emperor's champion, in exchange for the freedom of the fey of the empire. For as long as he reigns, he has agreed fey cannot be bought or sold as slaves."

Galen's eyes widened, warmed. He leaned against the table, then lowered himself to study his face closely.

Gawain could feel his breath on his bruised and swollen face. He hoped Galen wouldn't mind how cracked his lips were, when he--

"That's going to need a drain," he remarked boredly, poking a particularly painful lump on his temple. But his eyes were twinkling with humor now. 

He chuckled again. "There's no one else in the world I'd rather put a pipe in me."

Galen's eyebrows shot up to his hairline. "Is that so? Well, let's see if you're that cheeky when you see the amount of puss that will come out of there. Stop smirking, it pulls the skin. If I miss, I will drain all of the pretty out of your face."

It took a lot of concentration not to move when he wanted to laugh, to ask questions. 

The doctor kept walking circles around him for different angles of view. "Tsk. They really did a number on you. Are you sure you won?"

Gawain's smirk faltered a little, but he nodded. "Yes. Yes, I killed him." He heard a distant pounding somewhere. The line of legionnaires behind him, beating their swords against their shields. The Persians stomping their feet on the other side of the circle.

Galen put his hands under Gawain's shoulder and hip. "And what have they done to you for it!" He levered him up to turn him on his front. "No good deed goes-- oh--!"

Gawain's little warm flicker of hope died away. The blood would be more than obvious, and what was done to him--

"I'm sorry," he said, the gentleness in his voice a contrast to his previous dance between professional and teasing. "I didn't know." But he didn't draw away or express any further pity. He paused, guiding Gawain's hands to the sides of the table, and briefly closing over one of them to indicate that he should hold on.

Gawain obeyed, and was glad that he did. He devoted all of his attention to not getting pulled into the darkness, not to get lost in the brutal memories of what had been done to him. Sometimes it wasn't enough, he wasn't able, and he must have made a sound or something, because, Hidden bless him, Galen started describing what he was doing.

The cold, sure sound of his voice burned through the darkness like the North Star. Like a meteor. Hygiene theory. The structure of the lower digestive tract and anus. A description of the differences in care for wounds in soft tissue. Herbs and minerals for easing digestion. The nature of different types of bruises. 

And when he was finished, when Gawain was sewn back together body and mind, he helped him turn back to his side, washed the blood and gore from his hands, and returned to sit on the table next to him, solid and warm, and watched his face for a long moment.

"You did this for us," he said, expression flat but voice full of emotion. "You will be whole again. Beautiful again. I promise you. I will see to you personally."

Gawain gazed back. "'Us'?"

"We will never be slaves again," he said out loud, as if he was trying out how it sounded. "Because of the loyal and brave…?"

"Gawain," he croaked.

"The loyal and brave Gawain. Does the loyal and brave Gawain kiss siren men?"

"I would certainly kiss  _ you _ ," he replied before he could think the words.

Galen leaned down and brushed his lips very, very softly against Gawain's cracked, swollen ones. "Heal, so you may do so."

Gawain sighed.

"I will wrap your ribs again later. Whoever did these was obviously drunk and upside down somehow."

-

They were inseparable after that. Galen tended Gawain's hurts until he was as good as new, and then they tended each other's wants, and hearts, and Galen was more than pleased to switch into lecturer mode at the drop of a hat whenever Gawain wanted to know something. After a year, he even permitted Gawain to act as his assistant in house calls and observe surgeries, provided he kept his mouth shut about being fey. 

But Kaze's fears eventually came to pass, and the cultists from the desert gathered power even in Alexandria. They crawled into town and formed a gang. The authorities did nothing when they began burning books, preaching about the place of women. 

The political tide had shifted dramatically after the emperor had announced that the fey were no longer permitted to be bought and sold, and that all Fey slaves were free. The special treatment bred resentment, so when the cultists murdered fey, the guard was not inclined to do anything about it.

Gawain had doomed his own people. He told Galen as much, and they argued, and he cried, and they held onto each other more tightly on nights when there was shouting and fires in the street. 

One late afternoon, a chariot came rolling down their street between the lecturing amphitheatre where Galen taught two days a week, and the Serapeum, where the biggest and most beautiful library in the city was. A drive Galen made regularly when he needed to find a text or talk to a scholar. 

Gawain didn't see who was on the chariot, but he saw the mob of long-haired, unwashed men with wooden bludgeons lining the street. He heard them jeering and shouting abuse. His sword was in his hand before he saw them haul the passenger off of the chariot and throw him on the ground.

He laid  _ waste _ to the cultists, driven by rage from years of watching them get away with actual murder, grief from lost friends and allies. There were a few more hours of sunlight yet, and if they were between him and Galen, he would cut them to tiny pieces and leave them for the crows.

But even as fast as he could move, he was too late. There were limbs strewn everywhere, from the cultists and the occupant of the chariot alike. He stood over the biggest part of the driver's body, and breathed hard, mind blank. A woman. A woman in scholar's robes had been driving the chariot. Not Galen.

He looked around the now-deserted street. He was standing in the middle of a  _ lot  _ of corpses. He had to move.

He ducked into the nearest alley, stripped off his outer garment, scrubbed the blood off his face and neck as well as he could, and then dumped it and his short sword. He ran, then walked for hours, eventually ending up crouched in a corner where Kaze's friends often left messages. 

The confused satyr that found him there took him to a safe house and bade him wash, clothed him in a Roman merchant's tunic and sandals, and took him to Kaze.

Who took one look at him and raised an eyebrow. "What did you do this time?"

"I killed a lot of people."

She sat back in her chair and studied him for a moment. "I heard something about it. I hoped it was just some gangs fighting. You are a wanted creature now."

He nodded. "Galen. Can you… somehow… if I'm killed or I have to run…?"

She pursed her lips. "Bring him to the docks. I'll have a ship ready."

He exhaled and it was like bringing up bits of glass. Their life here was over. He had made a terrible mistake, fighting back.

"If you had stood by and watched them take her apart," Kaze told him knowingly, "You would no longer be the kind of person I wanted at my side."

He tucked his chin down and his shoulders bowed. "Is this the end of the world?"

"It is the end of  _ this _ world. Let's go now, before we can't." 

\--

The sun had set by the time he was home. Gawain found Galen walking along the row of bodies on the street, where the city guard had laid them one next to the other for identification. He stood in an alley off the main road and whistled softly to get Galen's attention, waved him over. 

When they were both out of sight of the street, Galen threw himself into Gawain's arms and embraced him almost too tightly. "I thought I was about to see you in that pile of bodies. They told me you were fighting here."

Gawain kissed him deeply. "I was. We need to go right now."

"Go? What?"

"I killed those people. All of them except the woman. We need to go right now."

Galen grasped his arm and hauled him down the alley and around a corner, to the back of their home. "You need your sword and armor. I need my work."

"We need to go  _ right now _ ," he insisted.

"Please, Gawain. I need you to defend me and you can't do that in… whatever that is you're wearing." He cracked the back door open and, to his credit, peered inside and listened for a long moment. "Empty. Let's go."

They slipped in silently and did not speak or light any candles or lamps. Galen threw his papers in a bag. Gawain stripped out of the borrowed merchant's tunic and reached for his arming garments and armor.

The gate in the courtyard slammed open. 

"Go," Gawain ordered, grabbing his longsword instead. 

"You know I can't," Galen refused, grabbing Gawain's knife and a candle from the desk. He lit it quickly, and collected wax from it as soon as it began to melt.

"Go," he begged. "They won't come for you. You can get the ship to Athens."

But he shook his head, laying a hand on his arm and kissing him for the last time. "If I left you, I would die anyway. Better to die at your side. Here," he leaned forward and put a blob of wax in each of Gawain's ears.

They made for the back door, but armed men met them in the hall-- guards and cultists both. Gawain stood between them and his lover and fought as well as he could without a scrap of cloth on him and with a sword designed for an open battlefield.

Then something happened. The men dropped their weapons and stood staring in awe. Gawain paused, then felt a hand on his shoulder. Behind him, Galen was singing, and in front of him, the men were still and peaceful.

They walked together through the crowd of them, to the back door of the house, and Gawain hoped against all hope that they would make it, that the streets would be somehow clear. That he had killed half the cultists, and Galen had the others captive with his voice. Hidden, how he wanted to pull the wax from his ears and get lost in the sound of his lover's voice. He could again, once they were safe. Once they were--

The door opened on the sneering, gap-toothed face of a guard, his ears stuffed with something. Gawain ran him through with what felt like an outraged shout. Others behind him surged forward, pushing them back. The hallway was too narrow to swing. There we so many of them. He carpeted the hall with bodies before they overpowered him, disarmed him, pulled him away from Galen and shoved him to the ground. They pushed past him and silenced the siren, gagged him. They bound their hands behind them and dragged them both into the alley.

And suddenly, the guards had disappeared. There were only cultists now, and the stench of their collected, unwashed bodies was revolting. One of them approached Gawain, grabbed him by the hair, and plucked the wax from his ears.

"--this anymore, your doctor whore can't work his magic with a broken jaw."

Gawain lunged and snapped his teeth, not caring how feral he looked. He tried to twist around, to see Galen.

"Oh very savage. Typical pagan animal. Fey, if the rumors are to be believed. An affront to the most high." The cultist-- the only one who could string a sentence together, apparently-- gestured to the one behind Gawain. "Turn him around. Let him see."

They did. Gawain stopped struggling. 

Galen was bound and his clothes torn, his jaw obviously broken and beginning to swell on one side. One eye was beginning to bruise and swell. And he was bent double, with a cultist behind him and one holding him by the back of his neck, with a long knife under his throat.

"He figured it out. He's smarter than he looks." The talking cultist stood behind him and forced him down with a hand on the back of his neck. "If you struggle," he told him, voice deceptively bored but edged with something that made his flesh crawl. "We will cut his throat. If you fight us or call out for help, we will cut his throat. If someone comes to help you, we will cut his throat. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Gawain whispered, eyes locked with Galen's.

"Good."

Galen's eyes widened, and then he began to weep.

Gawain couldn't think about what was happening to him. All he could think about was how Galen was hurt, how he was crying. He'd never seen Galen cry before. It was terrifying, and it physically hurt him. He wanted so badly to comfort him, to protect him from whatever was making him cry like that. 

Galen leaned forward until their faces were close enough that he could feel the gentle but erratic puff of his breath. And he quietly, brokenly, sang, as best he could. Even for the pain, the sound was so, so sweet.

-

When Gawain was next able to perceive the world around him, the world was totally dark. He was on the ground, and his body protested being made to feel anything again. He groaned. Opened his eyes. The sky was over him, and the stars. There was no moon. 

The world smelled strongly of blood tonight. There was the sound of horses and people moving.

He rolled to his side and looked around for the source of the smell. The hot burning between his legs made him think it might just be him, but it was too strong.

Across from him, discarded like he was nothing, was Galen's corpse, his throat cut wide open and his head bent at an angle unnaturally opposed to that of his neck.

Gawain whimpered. 

Someone seized him by the ankles and began to tie them with rope, but it didn't matter. He strained his neck to look at Galen, to keep looking at his North Star as long as he could, at the meteor that guided his life. He wept, reached out for the cold and grotesque form as if he could somehow force time backwards.

Someone slapped a horse and shouted, and hooves and wheels started away, and then Gawain was dragged away too. It felt like his body was being ripped away from his heart.

\--

Kaze found him outside the city, bleeding and ruined, like she had before. She and two others got him onto a horse, then onto a ship. Then the ship was sailing away from Alexandria, and they were sitting on the deck together. Everyone around them was shouting orders and alarm and the fear was tangible.

The city was on fire. The Serapeum was burning. The smaller libraries were burning. The temples were burning. The screaming was audible from the boat even as they sailed away. Ships left the harbor before and behind them.

A loud, thunderous rumble reached them. "The Serapeum has fallen," someone said aloud, with solemnity. The fear and anger was in their voice, but so was the surrender.

The fire of that temple, that place of learning-- Galen's favorite place-- cauterized the wound left behind by the amputation of Gawain's entire life.

\--

Polly struggled with the stream of the wounded that came from Llangenny, the largest fey settlement the paladins had yet dared to burn. Gawain was still bringing in the wounded, hours after the first had begun to arrive. The burns were the worst, and some of them would be gone to the Twilight before nightfall. She had three healers working, and a dozen helpers fetching supplies and directing the newcomers to wait. Polly reviewed them and sent the least urgent to the field surgeons, and the most likely to survive to Yeva. 

Then the weirdest thing happened. 

Gawain marched into the tent and scrubbed up to the elbows and got to work. He had a distant, grim expression like he usually did after battles, but this one was colder. Determined.

"What the  _ fuck _ are you doing in my tent?" She demanded, trying to snap him out of whatever head space he was in. She didn't have time to deal with his trauma right now.

"There are too many. Let's get to work," he told her. He turned to a helper an raised his chin. "Fish skins. As many as you can get from the kitchens. No salt. Go."

"Belay that," Polly snapped. "Are you a healer, Gawain?"

"I was," he said coldly. "The matrix on the inner skin of a fish has the same structure as flesh. If you use it to seal burn wounds, a patient will heal faster and have almost no chance of infection, provided the wound is properly cleaned." He waited, eyes locked with hers.

She turned to the helper. "What are you waiting for? Do as he says."

To his credit, the helper dashed off without asking questions.

"We will talk about this later," she groused at him.

He nodded, and turned to the triage line. 

They worked side by side almost without speaking. Gawain felt Galen's words tumble from his mouth, short and precise. Sometimes he had to stop and repeat himself, realizing that they were  _ literally _ Galen's words, still in Latin or Greek.

It took seven more hours to treat those who could be treated, and ease the pain of those who couldn't. Gawain stayed at her side the entire time. Then, when she finally closed the tent, when the queue was finally down to cuts and bruises, he left without a word.

After she washed up, she found him in a meadow still covered in blood, drinking from a flask and gazing at the sky.

"What the fuck was that?"

He didn't look at her. It took a long time for him to answer. "I… I used to want to be a healer. I was apprenticed to one. My… he was…" He tried to speak, but no sound would come out. So he took another drink instead.

"Oh." She hovered awkwardly. "I'm sorry, I didn't… I didn't know." She patted him on the shoulder. "Do you want me to…"

"No," he answered honestly. "You're forgiven. Please leave me be. I need…" The words disappeared again. He took another drink.

"I understand." She left.

He stared at the night sky, but he couldn't see any stars.


	11. Hallucinations

He felt it faintly at first, and dismissed it as a product of his exhaustion. It happened again, faintly, again when he hadn't slept. The third time, he felt it when he was so tired he was losing time, every third moment even as he walked. 

He made it to his tent and fell fully-armored onto his bed, and just breathed, hoping he could fall asleep and forget about disarming and washing and just do it in the morning. He would take the aches and pains in exchange for twenty extra minutes. But he'd been awake so long that his mind had forgotten how to sleep. The inside of his skull itched. It felt like the backs of his eyes were sparking against his brain.

There was a hand in his hair, gently stroking his scalp.

He startled, and threw himself to his feet with a shout.

There was no one in his tent but him.

He got to work untying his armor, trying to ignore the paranoid tickle at the base of his spine and the way shadows seemed to move where they shouldn't. Once he was down to his undergarments and stockings, he tucked himself under all of his blankets and closed his eyes tightly against the moonlight and whatever hallucination had touched him.

It did not touch him again that night.

When it did come back, he was again alone in his tent, this time having just been released from the healer's custody after treatment for an arrow through the shoulder. It had brought infection, and he had struggled against the fever for three days. He was worn out, aching, stunk of the sweat of sickness, and just wanted to curl up in his own bed. 

Tentatively this time, the ghost touch started at the center of his forehead, tracing back along the part of his hair to the back of his head, then it paused.

He whimpered, and stood very, very still. At first, he didn't know if he was waiting for it to go away, or happen again, but as his eyes fell closed and his breath seemed to scrape the insides of him, he leaned his head forward and whispered. "Please."

The touch returned, stroking from the top of his head to the nape of his neck, then from his temple to the back of his ear on one side, then the other.

He sighed and leaned into it. With his eyes closed, he felt a hand on his back, gently pushing him towards his bed, and he obeyed it, climbing beneath the blankets and surrendering to gravity. 

The touch continued soothingly, petting his head sweetly and sometimes squeezing his shoulder gently. He imagined a mother might do something like this. He'd seen mothers do this sometimes. Sometimes they would sing quiet, soft songs until their children would calm or sleep. He tried to think of one, but it had never really seemed important to remember them.

When a voice hummed a quiet, soft song in his mind, he locked his jaw against a sob and sniffled instead, tried and failed to hold back tears. He was losing his mind. Insanity was giving him a mother. It was all he could do not to bawl like a child.

He woke up feeling like he needed three more years of sleep, but he felt solid and warm, like he could pick up the world on his shoulders again.

He hoped she would come back. Sometimes she did, but not always. Sometimes she wasn't there after a battle. Sometimes she was. Sometimes she missed when he was worn down by the constant stream of tragedy. Sometimes she didn't. 

As time went on, she visited less and less, and he only became more and more tired. After the war, he thought about her sometimes, and decided that it was the result of his mind trying to protect itself against the unimaginable. But even his mind couldn't conjure a reality in which he had a consistent and reliable mother. 

He supposed that was fitting.


	12. "Who Are You?"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another tie-in for "What Goes After The Fall"

They needed an army. Boats. Horses. Weapons. A leadership structure. Supplies. Healers. Carts. Armor. Maps. Contacts. Influence.

May all the Hidden damn them, they needed Gawain's family's help. He was sore but mending when the ship made landfall, but he was in no condition to sit a horse. He did anyway, and they traveled north as fast as Gawain's broken body would let them. They learned quickly that Fey were not welcome everywhere anymore and the law would not protect them. 

They avoided towns, staying in hermitages and hunter's lodges, stables and barns. The weather grew less hospitable as they went, the land less forested, the game less common. They stayed in a fisherman's hut to wait for the ferry.

The ferry was utterly unremarkable and it left them on the shore with no landmarks visible in any direction, just vast green and grey and haar.

Gawain and Kaze wrapped their cloaks tightly and trudged into the fog, following a beaten trail with the footprints of sheep and goats. They walked for an hour. Two hours. Just the same trail, before and behind them.

Frustrated, Gawain raised his head and shouted into the fog. "By your leave."

His voice echoed for a while. 

Another voice echoed back. "Who are you?"

He glanced sideways at Kaze, who shrugged. May as well. "I am Sir Gawain, son of Lot."

The voice called back. "You're who?"

"I am--"

"No, no, I heard ye just fine. I've just never heard of you."

He frowned. "Need you have?"

"Well I'm not gonna let just anybody int' the island, am I? 's troubled times. Come back when you can prove who you are." 

And then the silent fog behind them lifted, and they were on the shore, at the ferry pier.

They went back to the mainland and sought out a sorcerer who could divine his parentage using sdroo of his blood. The product of the sorcerer's magic was a shield, a silver field with a black raven in one corner and a blue lion in the other. It would not rust, nor dent, nor scratch, the sorcerer promised, and it would prove to any who asked that his father was Lot of Orkney and Lothian, and his mother was Anna Margause, daughter of the king of the Fey in Wessex. And that he was their first born son.

He returned with Kaze to the island, and this time the ferry deposited them in a field of reeds. A boardwalk stretched into the distance, but this time he shouted before they bothered with a lot of walking. "Let us pass."

The same voice asked again. "Who are you?"

"I am Sir Gawain, the first-born son of Lot and Anna Margause, as you can clearly see, and I have come for an audience with my family."

"You've got some balls on ypu, I'll give you that."

He raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"You're excused, think nothing of it."

He glared into the reeds. "You're not about to--"

"Send you off in search of something else? Afraid so. Come back when you're ready to prove yourself in battle."

He growled. "I'll fight you right now."

Kaze quirked an eyebrow.

"That's the spirit, what's-your-name!" The voice hooted. "Meet me on the field outside the castle when you've got a horse and a sword and some armor, and your… when you're mended."

"Who are you then?" He demanded.

"I'm the first-born son of Lot and Anna Morgause, you great twat, now fuck off and come back when you can stand upright without bleeding."

Gawain shouted wordless annoyance into the reeds, but turned and boarded the ferry again. 

They returned two weeks later, with a horse and a sword and some armor and Gawain's somewhat improved constitution. This time, the ferry deposited them within view of a great greystone keep, its towers flying flags of black and ivory, its gate closed, and its walls deserted. They walked the horses to the field outside, and stood before the gate.

"Let us in," Gawain called.

"Who are--"

"You know who I fucking am," he roared. "Fight me or I will--"

"You'll what?" The voice asked. Waited for a response. Didn't get one. "Yeah, that's what I thought. Ah well. Let's get this over with so you can fuck off back where you came from."

The gate opened. The sound of hooves started from inside the castle and picked up speed.

Gawain turned his horse and recovered some ground, then turned again and slung his shield around his neck, dropped his visor, and gave the horse his shins. The horse took off like a comet, tearing up the peat and rocketing forward. He braced his heels in the stirrups as his attacker came into view, a lance tilted at him while he had none. He leaned forward, concentrating on the tip of that lance.

His attacker's lance shattered against his shield in a geometrically-pleasing spiral of wooden splinters. The force of it transferred back along the line of Gawain's spine, hips, legs, into the horse's haunches, and he winced in sympathy with the charger's protest.

His attacker was thrown clean off of his own horse, and the horse's legs gave out. It stumbled and slid to the earth, screaming. His attacker landed with a sound like a sack of tools.

Gawain stopped and soothed his horse, then swung down out of the saddle and strode over to where his attacker was struggling to rise. He drew his sword and slipped the point under the gap between his helmet and hauberk. "Yield."

"Who are you?" A new voice asked.

At the gates of the castle stood a man at least as tall as Gawain, robed in rich clothes in black and ivory. His hair, skin, and eyes were a soft brown, but his countenance was a cliff face and his posture was that of a lion at rest.

Gawain stepped back and offered his attacker a hand to rise.

His attacker spat at it and lunged forward, coming to his feet already swinging. The two fought with fists for a moment, but Gawain overcame him and shoved him back to the ground.

"Yield," he said again.

"He yields," the man at the gate said boredly. "Who are you?"

"I am Sir Gawain," he told him, hoping this was the last time he'd have to introduce himself for at least the rest of the day. "I seek an audience with my family."

The man raised his chin a fraction of an inch, considering. Then he turned and went back into the castle yard, gesturing to guards there. "Throw him in the dungeon. Let her do as she pleases."

The guards came out and took hold of him, disarmed him, and took him to the dungeons. They took his armor and supplies from him, and his horse, and threw him in a cell.

A week later, they let him out and guided him to a chamber where there was a hot bath waiting, a set of clean, fine clothes, a plate of food, and a warm bed. He enjoyed all of these as well as he might, having been deprived of them for so long.

In the morning, servants brought him breakfast, then helped him dress and brought him to the great hall, where his parents and a collection of the nobility were collected for the day's business.

As soon as he stepped into the sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows, he knew he was in the lion's den. But none of the lions were looking at him until he strode past the rows of seated nobility and faced his father directly.

The conversation died away as the other nobles noticed him and the uncomfortable demand he carried with him. King Lot ignored him until he couldn't, then fixed him with a bored stare. "Who are you?" He asked airily.

"I am Sir Gawain, your first-born son."

The nobility murmured amongst themselves.

King Lot rolled his eyes and turned back to what he was doing, but snapped his fingers and gestured at him. "Take him back."

And so he spent another week in prison. But this time, he came out with a plan. When he was conducted to court again, he said nothing, but quietly joined a table where a group of less finely-garbed nobility were talking over wool yields and trade opportunities. He listened for awhile and got the gist of it, until one of them-- who definitely already knew the answer-- asked his name and if he had any thoughts on the mainland wool market. 

"My name is Gawain," he told them without invoking his title nor parentage. "I think you'll have a better market in the Flemish lowlands than you will in Gaul. Their peasants are more affluent and can afford fine wool, and they've a say in their governance so good trade will foster good relations."

"A say in their governance?" One of them asked. "How do you mean?"

He held back a smile, and began introducing the concepts of elected leadership, self-organizing labor, arming the peasant class in their own defense, providing for the common good, and many other ideas he'd learned over the recent years. 

The bourgeoisie and lower nobility were willing to hear him, but as he approached more and more elevated people, the interest vanished, until the only thing he would hear from the highborn were the same disinterested three words: "Who are you?"

He was in the dungeon again before long, having caught too much attention with his pedagogy. This time, two weeks passed, the last three days of which were without food and water. He wondered if he would achieve anything, trying to get his father's attention this way. If they didn't need the help so badly, he might have given up. With the ferocity of his cramping stomach, he considered giving up anyway. He'd fight all of Christendom for a loaf of bread and a bit of cheese.

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

The guard wasn't at the end of the hall anymore. It was someone else. A tall, sharp shadow with precise posture laid over coiled violence. He dragged his hand along the grated doors as he walked. 

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

"Who are you?" He asked into the dimly lit row of cells.

There was no one else in here. He had to know. Gawain frowned and tried to answer, but his throat was too dry. He coughed instead.

Thump-thump-thump. Pause. 

"Who are you?" He repeated.

"Gawain," he rasped.

He scoffed. "Who is Gawain?" He asked with disgust. He stopped outside Gawain's cell and leaned his arms through the grate, gazing down at his form where it draped against the rocks. 

"Your… your son…" he frowned harder. Wouldn't he know this? What game was he playing? It was so hard to think.

Lot sighed and unlocked the door, pulling it open. He knelt next to him and reached out, gathered him by the front of his tunic and helped him to sit up.

Gawain reflexively reached up to steady himself on Lot's forearm, sucking in air as the world shifted around him. He was so dizzy, and moving too fast--

Lot's fist slammed into the side of his head. 

His head snapped back against the rock. His ears rang. "Hng?"

The fist came again, and then a third time. Then Lot wiped his bloodied fist on Gawain's shirt. "Who are you?" He prompted.

His ears were ringing too loudly to hear the question, and his vision wouldn't focus. He brought his hands between them to block any more blows, but no more came.

Lot cleared his throat. "Who. Are. You."

Gawain worked his smarting jaw for a moment, then answered, "I am Sir Gawain."

He nodded. "And who is Sir Gawain?"

His mind struggled to find an answer that wouldn't earn more blows. "Sir Gawain, knighted by the Emperor of Rome. Slayer of the champion Gormandius. The Emancipator."

He nodded again. "And?"

He exhaled harshly, drawing back against the wall. "That's… that's all."

Lot patted him on the head like a puppy. "Good. That's very good. Where will you go next?"

"Away from here," he sobbed.

The king smiled wryly. "The only right answer." He stood up and walked away, leaving the door open.


	13. Hiding Injury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tie-in for "Scents and Sensibility"

Gawain chewed on pine twigs as he checked the trap line. The woods were crisp, freezing, and quiet, but for the occasional call of a crow or the whisper of field mice under the snow. The traps were empty, and every empty trap felt like a defeat. It had been three days since the last catch.

He was so tired, but after checking the last of the traps, he doubled back to where he had smelled deer shit and followed its trail for a time. A deer would be a much needed prize. The salt fish had run out, and acorns were dwindling, and the winter cache was a half-empty barrel of salt they had hoped to use. But the epidemic had taken half of their laborers and all of their energy, and now the winter was a beautiful, barren swan song.

He wondered for a moment how long he had been staring at the deer before he noticed it. Luckily, it either didn't notice him, or didn't consider the ragged sky man much of a threat. He let fly an arrow, praying the sharp pain in his arm wouldn't affect his aim. The Hidden heard him; the arrow pierced the deer's eye, went right through its brain, and dropped it at once. He felt the skin on his arm tear open again, hot and wet under the cloth he'd tied around it.

It was an excellent shot made twice as good by its effect, because he didn't have the energy to chase down a wounded deer. 

With great effort, he tied the hind legs to a tree branch and gutted the animal, fishing out its liver to inspect. Free of spotting or discoloration-- it had been healthy until its death. Almost before he could stop himself, he took a bite, ate the whole thing. It was slimy and salty, but it was the best thing he could remember eating.

He rubbed snow on his hands and face to clean them, then cut the animal down and began dragging it back to camp, hoping he was close enough to make it, and that there were no bears.

The Hidden smiled on him again. The second time he stumbled and fell, he was joined by a pale and bearded Lancelot. The ash man had been out foraging for mushrooms and saw him coming. Together, they were able to get the deer the rest of the way into camp and to the deserted mess tent. They had a train of followers by that time, sunken-eyed and hopeful. 

Gawain rested and kept them out of the tent while Lancelot drained the remaining blood into a bucket, skinned the carcass, and began parting out the meat. He held back the haunches and rear legs, but passed pieces forward to Gawain, who distributed them to any who came with open hands.

In the end, they had to turn away many. Too many.

Gawain took a share of meat, favoring his left arm subconsciously. "For Kaja. Squirrel--?"

Lancelot nodded and cut the remaining meat, wrapped it in the deer's own skin, and tucked it under one arm. He took the bucket as well, to cook.

They parted, Lancelot towards the children's tent and Gawain towards Kaja's. His arm ached somehow more and more as he approached it, knowing what he would have to do.

Kaja sat in the tent with the children, exhausted and thin. The children lay together under all the blankets they had, listless but awake. Alive.

Gawain indulged in a sigh of relief, then cleared his throat and held up the venison.

Kaja managed a half smile and stood, her infant tucked in her arms. They went together to the fire, and both one-handed, managed to stoke the flames and cook.

"Does it hurt terribly?" She asked for what had to be the tenth time.

He smiled bravely and shook his head. "No. Not… it's not bad."

She politely did not mention that he wasn't using that arm at all. 

They took the meat to the children and he insisted Kaja take a share. She had to take care of the little ones.

When the children were occupied, she laid a hand on his good arm and grimaced. "I haven't… haven't been able."

He nodded, and they turned away from the bed, hiding their actions with their backs as best they could. He shed his woolen coat and pulled up his sleeve.

Kaja's face darkened when she saw the state of his bandage. She gently helped him unwrap it, frown deepening. 

"It opened while I was getting the deer," he dismissed. "I've had worse."

She pursed her lips, but said nothing. There was nothing to say. If the wound had been closed over, he would have had to open it again for this.

He accepted the bundled form of the infant child, folded the blankets back, and tilted her tiny face towards the wound. They both sighed in relief when she began to suckle; sometimes she didn't. 

Kaja hadn't been able to nurse the child in weeks. When there had still been a goat to give milk, it had been a navigable disaster. But the camp had decided to kill and eat the goat while it still had meat on it, rather than letting it dwindle further. Now Gawain visited three times a day, but he worried that he wouldn't be able to for much longer.

Spring was coming. The game would return. The river would thaw. He just had to keep them alive until spring. 

He nodded off, and awoke slumped against Kaja, who was tying the old bandage around his arm as a tourniquet and pressing a fresh one to the wound. He startled and reached for the place on his lap where the child had been.

"Sh," she soothed him. "She is here with me."

He let out a slow breath, willing his heart to slow down.

She wrapped and tied off the new bandage, then looked up at him with a terrible gratitude. 

"We'll make it," he told her. "Spring is almost here. A few more weeks at most. I have already heard the ice creaking in the river." He lied.

She knew it. "Thank you. Can you make it back?"

He tested his legs. "Yes," he lied.

She helped him up and as far as the door of the tent, wondering if tomorrow he would be able to return. "Hidden keep you."

"They keep us all," he replied without really thinking about it.

He stumbled back to the tent, arriving before Lancelot, and toed off his boots. His balance forsook him as he did, and he crumpled to the dirt floor. His vision darkened for he knew not how long.

Lancelot found him on the ground, but said nothing. It wasn't the first time. He helped him to his bed and pulled the blankets over him, let him sleep as he prepared what was left of the meat.

Gawain awoke again when Lancelot shook his arm. He hissed in pain before he could stop himself, and pulled away. He levered himself up on his good arm to sit, and caught a hard look from his tent mate.

"You're hurt," he said quietly, touching his arm with light but firm fingers.

In his exhaustion, he wanted Lancelot to push up his sleeve, unwrap the bandage, and somehow make his flesh knit closed, and never have to see Kaja or her children again. But it was a selfish thought, and he subdued it immediately. "It's nothing anyone can do anything about, now."

Lancelot frowned as he pulled his arm away, but did not press the matter. Neither of them had the strength. Instead, he pressed a piece of smoked meat into his good hand.

"I… I ate the liver, in the forest," he admitted.

"Good," he replied. "Eat that too."

"You should--" he started.

Lancelot's frown turned severe. "You walk miles every day. I make a stroll around the camp. Eat the fucking meat."

He chuckled and obeyed, wondering how he had gotten so lucky, to be able to die next to Lancelot.


	14. "I Didn't Mean It"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not a tie-in for anything.

Lancelot had been forgiven. And he didn't seem to be taking it well.

He had surrendered himself to the Fey Guard, making him a prisoner of war. He had found his way into Gawain's care when he had returned to the camp, and from then on, he had been a kept man. A pet. 

When anyone else could see or hear them, the Green Knight was his jailor. His commander. His protector. His provider. Every necessity came as if granted by the Green Knight himself, and he accepted it because he had no other choice.

It grated on him, even as he tolerated it so that he could serve, and earn the forbearance of the Fey, if not their forgiveness. He stumbled on this path sometimes, but the Green Knight was always close at hand, ready to steady him and stand between him and the Fey who would harm him-- sometimes figuratively, but often literally. He was patient, and kind, and tolerant, and dependable, and honest.

And he hated him.

He wanted him to crack, to fail, to be less than perfect, so that he could feel like there was someone beside him rather than leading him. He didn't want a father figure, he wanted a peer. If he couldn't have that, he at least wanted to know where the boundaries of this endless patience were. He wanted him to snap at him or strike him, so he could understand what not to do. 

A dark part of him wanted to tear that smug, golden face into tiny pieces.

So he began to test the limits of his tolerance by questioning orders and dismissing the norms of Fey culture openly. He challenged him in front of others, poked little holes in his authority, and insulted him directly. 

The Green Knight's damned perfect face never even twitched. With a steadiness that would have made the stones jealous, he redirected Lancelot's angry tests back to him. Lancelot only grew more and more angry.

Until damn him, he even tried to be kind and ask about it. He'd noticed Lancelot becoming short of temper, wanted to know if he was adjusting well.

"To hell with adjusting," he practically shouted. "I would sooner adjust to a burning house. The ignorance and ugliness of this collection of uneducated hicks from a hundred tribes is as worthy of integration as a mouse nest."

The Green Knight's perfect mouth pressed into a thin, pale line.

Emboldened, Lancelot lashed out again. "And with you as their war marshall, they will surely perish in just as dire circumstances as they arrived here, homeless and hopeless. I could lead a handful of the faithful into this place and burn it to the ground in the night, before your half-trained farmers could raise an alarm. They sleep on watch and laze when they should work. Your healers are literal children. Half your people can't read, and less than half have been on the receiving end of soap in the last season."

He'd struck to the quick, now, he could see in how those perfect green eyes narrowed. He could practically taste the electricity in the air.

Gawain took a short breath, as if being forced underwater, but instead he still tried, damn him. "I know what it's like to be surrounded by the unfamiliar. I know what it's like to lose your home--"

"You don't know what anything is like," he screamed. "You have your people around you, your friends, you don't know what it's like to lose your home and to be utterly powerless to stop it. You don't know what it's like to lose your mother and father. You never were forced to learn new languages to speak to people who wanted to kill you. You were never forced to kill for an enemy. Never been told you're wrong because of how you were born."

Gawain was staring past him, and a little to the side, as if he wasn't even there. 

There it was, he was open for a strike. Lancelot lunged for the point. "You just want to control me like Carden did."

His expression didn't change, but something about his posture did. Lancelot watched with a bitter triumph as he sort of deflated, his chin and shoulders pulling inward as if to physically shield himself. 

No, wait. That wasn't the reaction he wanted.

Gawain turned and walked away. 

No, wait. "Gawain, I--"

He didn't stop or even pause, he simply left him standing alone next to the campfire. In spite of its low crackle, he suddenly felt a chill, as if a cloak which had protected him had suddenly been ripped away. This was the boundary he had been searching for, but now that he found it, he was suddenly on the wrong side of it, and he didn't know how to return.

He followed, his heart pounding harder than it ever had before receiving a lashing. "Gawain, stop, I didn't mean it."

Gawain did stop this time.

Something about his posture kept Lancelot at a distance, not from physical threat, but something that made his gut churn unpleasantly. Like standing at the very edge of a high cliff.

"You did mean it," he told him with finality. There would be no arguing. "You meant it, and you will own your words. You need to feel in control, and you need to feel safe; and you will always be both of those things when you are with me. But right now, I need you to stay away from me. Just for awhile." He looked up, and there was something shifting and unsteady behind his eyes. "Give me tonight to myself. I will see you tomorrow." He walked away again.

This time Lancelot did not follow.

He wandered to the hill that overlooked the camp, and sat in the high grass that hid him from view. He sighed and scratched at his chest, where something pulled uncomfortably. He wasn't good at examining his emotions past identifying them and how to prevent them from harming others, and didn't have the energy to try. Not even for this.

Someone nearby cleared their throat.

"Sorry to disturb," he mumbled, and got to his feet.

A couple of yards away, Nimue's head popped up from the grass. "You don't have to go, I just wanted you to know you aren't here alone."

He glanced around, listened carefully. "Only you?"

"Only me. Not Arthur," she rolled her eyes. 

He stopped the grasses down in a circle so she could join him and they could hide together. 

When they were both seated, she fished a flask from the folds of her skirt and offered it to him.

He accepted, took a drink-- some sort of herbal liqueur-- and passed it back. Sighed.

"Lancelot?" she guessed.

He nodded. "Arthur?"

"Merlin," she replied, then took a pull from the flask. "Cryptic bastard."

He nodded again in empathy. Then after a minute, he smirked. "Men."

She laughed.

The comfortable quiet helped. The sun was setting over the camp, and the fires were being allowed to die down from cooking to warmth only. It would have been peaceful if not for the context of its existence.

"Did he finally snap, or--?"

Gawain didn't answer immediately. "He's scared. Traumatized. This is the first time he's been safe, and he needs to know how much of his life is his to control. Where the boundary between himself and others lies."

"And he tested that on you?"

He nodded, and took the flask back for another pull.

Sensing he was truly upset about it, Nimue's brows wrinkled together. "What did he do?"

He told her.

She frowned harder and put a hand on his back. "He was wrong to say any of that."

He shrugged. "He doesn't know me." He glanced sideways when she faced him. "What?"

"Everyone was certain you two know each other well. Carnally, even."

He chuckled. "No. He's too broken."

She leaned her head on his shoulder and rubbed his back. "How are you handling that?"

He smiled humorlessly. "When he's ready, I certainly will be."

"Not what I meant."

He let the smile become a smirk, but that died away when she waited patiently for his honesty. "It feels… unfair. Sharp, like having a blade slipped in between my ribs. He can scream and strike out at me and be angry at the world and I have to let him. It's what he needs, and it's how I can best help him."

"And how can I best help you?"

He reached over and took the flask from her again.

She gave him a wry smile. "That can't be the answer forever."

He took a drink, finally starting to feel the effects of the alcohol. The sharp edges of the world were softening, and it didn't hurt so much to be alive. "Just, let's get through this war. When everyone is safe, then I can work this out."

Her smile vanished. She squeezed him gently, and let him go. "I can't have you break before that. And I won't. Take your time with this, because you must."

He nodded, passing the flask back. "I will. Don't worry."

"Of course I worry," she scoffed. "What kind of terrible sister would I be, if I didn't?"

He smiled and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and if he shed a few tears into her hair, she never mentioned it.

-

Lancelot was more adrift than he had been before. Instead of drawing blood, he had cut the tether to the only constant reference point in his life. He hadn't slept. He thought to hurt himself in punishment, but he felt Gawain's disapproval even in his absence. He had come to the fire outside his tent before dawn and sat waiting, wrapped in his cloak. Paced. Gnawed his lip. Paced more.

But just as he had every morning, the Green Knight came out of his tent just after sunrise, and joined him at the fire for breakfast. They ate bread and a couple of small, sour apples in a silence which was colder than the morning frost.

Finally Lancelot overcame his fidgeting and reached out to grasp Gawain's arm.

He froze, unsure of what would come next, but ready for the troubled ash man to lash out again. He steeled himself to let it happen.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he crowded into his space without asking.

Gawain made a noise of surprise as Lancelot knelt in front of him on the cold ground and wrapped his arms around him. 

"I'm truly sorry, I had no right to say the things that I said. Please forgive me."

He slowly, hesitantly returned the embrace, and searched for what to say. He was so tired and empty of will to fight. It would be so much easier to forgive, so against his better judgement, he did. "I know. I ...understand. I do." He patted Lancelot's back gently. "Ssh. It's alright."

"Thank you," he whispered, crowding closer into Gawain's arms. "Thank you."

Gawain found that the apology meant more than he thought it would.


	15. "Run. Don't look back."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 15-16-17 form a coherent narrative.

They were outnumbered. This was always the case.

The Fey Guard, first just Kaze and himself, then a handful of friends gathered along the way, would arrive to a town that was just in front of the advancing line of Christian violence. They would warn the decision-makers, then the elders, then if (when) they refused to call for an evacuation, they would warn everyone.

Sometimes people listened, and they packed their things and headed north. They were the fortunate ones, and their supplies became valuable. Sometimes people didn't listen, and the Fey Guard would fall back into the forest, take up defensive positions around the routes into and out of town, and they would wait to cover their escape.

There was always confusion. People he had warned a day or two before would freeze in panic or ask him what was happening. As if they didn't know. So to jar them out of their panic, he didn't answer their questions, he only gave them instructions. They were the most vital instructions they would receive in their entire lives. Most followed them. Some didn't, and they always died.

"Run. Don't look back."

They would gather up the refugees later, and rejoin them with members of their village if they could, and send them north. But help was getting qharder and harder for them to find. The Fey Guard began finding them on the road and tried their best to care for them.

This is how they found their best support team, their planners and healers and cooks and blacksmiths and fletchers and fishers. But they were still outnumbered.

More and more, he heard his hopeless words on the tongues of the other Fey Guard, in place of war cries. "Run. Don't look back." 

The camp marshalls and child minders and healers and parents said it to each other, when the enemy advanced on their camp. Instead of "Born in the dawn," a statement of identity and perseverance, it was "Run. Don't look back."

In the retreat of his own tent, in the darkness of the middle watch when he tried and failed to sleep, it echoed back at him. "Run. Don't look back." There was nothing left for them to look back on. Nothing behind them but death.


	16. Broken Bones

During the evacuation of a village, his luck ran out. An arrow he didn't see or hear punched through his boiled leather armor and into his shoulder. He held back a shout, but the rain of blood must have given away his position in the trees. Every bow turned on him. He tried to put the trunk of the tree between him and the next volley, but it didn't cover the entire angle. He caught half a dozen grazes, one through the forearm, and one in the leg. 

He lost his grip and his balance, and fell out of the tree. He landed badly; his arrow-punctured leg didn't take his weight and he twisted, felt a nauseating crack in his leg and hip, fell backwards and tried to catch himself on his arm, but the bones of his forearm were stopped in their natural rotation by the shaft of the arrow. The pain in his wrist was intense. He blacked out for a moment.

When he opened his eyes, he swallowed down the urge to vomit and looked around. He was alone. The fighting had moved on. The paladins in their inexperience had assumed he was dead. Since the Fey Guard was only able to slow their advance, not drive them away, he was surely behind their line now, and might as well be dead anyway.

They had definitely left him. He knew logically it was the correct thing to do, but a pang of abandonment stabbed through him anyway, and it was the last wound he could take. He sighed and closed his eyes around a tear, and considered whether to try to splint his leg and hide, or to remove the arrows from his shoulder and thigh, and bleed out before the paladins could come back and torture him.

He swallowed bile and levered himself up on his good arm. He couldn't be sure he'd have the strength and time to do it if he was sighted later. He would have to do it now. He pulled himself over to lean against the tree, grasped the arrow shaft, and took several deep breaths to brace himself.

The flat of a blade fell across his wrist. He followed the line of it with dread, until his eyes found two warm brown ones. Familiar ones. "If you do that," Bergerum told him, "you'll bleed out before I can get you back."

"Leave me," he ordered.

"You're not the boss of me," he smiled, and moved closer. He used the blade of his dagger to cut the shaft from the arrow in his arm as gently as possible, above the armor. 

"Stop, damn you," he begged in a whisper. "Run. Don't--"

"Yeah yeah, don't look back," he whispered back. "Wouldn't dream of it." He looked over the wound on his shoulder and leg.

"Bergerum," he gave a low whine, grabbing at his forearm. "Go."

"Nah," he replied, and sawed through the shaft of the arrow sticking out of his shoulder. He didn't meet his eyes.

They both froze at the sound of footsteps in leaves. Fortunately, the steps passed them by and disappeared into the distant frey.

Gawain steeled himself, reached for the arrow in his leg, and began to pull.

Bergerum swore and punched him hard across the face, knocking him out. Breathing hard, he pulled the leather away from the arrow wound and checked the flow of bleeding. Steady, but still slowed by the presence of the stone arrowhead. Not swallow-tailed, thank the Hidden, but also not something he could remove until he could stop the bleeding that would follow.

He swore again and pulled Gawain's limp form across his shoulders. "Fucking sky people, weigh twice as much as the rest of us. Why couldn't you be a skywing, you asshole?"

He carried Gawain almost half a kilometer in a straight line away from the village, then turned north and kept on until the sun began to set. When he turned west and followed the sunset to rejoin the road and hopefully find the Guard, Bergerum was sure he was carrying a corpse. A heavy, smelly corpse that was definitely going to attract a bear or wolves. Would his friend forgive him for abandoning his corpse to wild animals? He hoped Gawain would have done the same for him, honestly.

His luck held, and there was a cart in sight as soon as he set foot on the road. He crept as carefully as he could to the back of it, surely not as quiet as he could be, but the driver wasn't wearing red and seemed to be exhausted. "Hello there! Help us, please!"

The driver twisted around in the seat and his eyes widened. He brought the mule to a stop and climbed down to help Bergerum put Gawain's still form in the cart. "What happened here?"

"We were attacked. The village was burned. We're trying to get away."

"You're too well armed for simply running from a raid," the driver pointed out. "And these breaks aren't from being bludgeoned. These are from a fall." He pointed at the swelling on Gawain's face from where Bergerum had knocked him out. "Except this. This is definitely from an impact."

"I… didn't know there were broken bones," Bergerum admitted. "We were covering the escape. He fell from a tree."

The driver nodded. "Well, he's in shock. Get in the cart and get the armor off of him, I will get us to a place where we can build a fire."

"There are people who can help us camped ahead," he supplied as he obeyed.

The driver climbed back onto the bench and gave the reigns a snap. The mule responded immediately and pulled into a begrudging trot. "How far ahead?"

"Five miles or so, by my reckoning from the top of the hill."

"He won't make that," the driver dismissed. "There's a cottage just half a mile ahead where I would spend the night anyway. We will go there, and we can see if I can patch up your friend enough to survive the night."

"There are healers--" he began to protest.

"And you can run ahead to fetch them if you want, but first we will warm him and set his bones and stop the bleeding from his leg, or he will die." 

There was something familiar about the man's tone. "You're too knowledgeable about battle wounds for simply driving a cart."

The driver chuckled. "Retired soldier. I fought the Picts at the wall and the Saxons for Rome. Now I drive a cart. What's your name?"

"Bergerum," he told him. "Yours?"

"Bediwyr."


	17. Field Surgery

They made it to the cottage as promised. Bergerum and the driver got Gawain out of the cart and onto a buckskin in front of the hearth. Bergerum started a fire and fetched a bucket of water from the well behind the cottage without being told.

Bediwyr lit a lantern and removed Gawain's armor with deft hands. When they lifted him to pull away the last of it, the chest plate knocked against the arrow in his shoulder and he groaned.

Bergerum put his daggers into the hearth to heat, and dipped a towel in the bucket of water, reached for the shoulder wound--

Gawain's hand came up and stayed him. "No," he rasped. "Boil it first."

"You're going to bleed out," he insisted, dabbing blood away from the wound so they could see the arrowhead.

"Better," he paused to clear his throat. "Better than infection. Boil the water and the rag."

Bediwyr shrugged and hung the bucket over the fire.

"Splint my leg first," Gawain told them, his voice strengthening as he regained consciousness. He frowned for a moment. "Did you hit me?"

"No?" Bergerum answered. "Yes. A little."

Gawain made a noise of disapproval, but forced himself up to look, then settled back down again. "Left leg, fibula. The small bone in my lower leg. You'll have to cut off my boot."

Bediwyr obliged, carefully slicing lengthwise from cuff to sole, then lifting it clear of the swollen ankle. He searched the house for something to make a splint, and ended up disassembling a wooden chair and fetching a coil of rope.

"Bergerum, come sit beside me," Gawain directed. "Lean your weight on my hip, and hold on with both hands above the knee. You can hold on harder than that."

"It will hurt," he warned uneasily.

"I am already in pain," Gawain told him patiently. "If you slip, it will be worse."

Bediwyr took hold of his ankle, counted from three, and yanked the bone down hard. He twisted just a bit and set the bone back in position, then quickly tied three chair legs around his shin with a length of rope.

Gawain sat back and breathed hard, shivering and trying not to vomit. After a few moments, as soon as he was able, he nodded to Bediwyr and told them, "That was the hard part. Everything else is straightforward. We'll start with my wrist, then the shoulder is the least complicated." He nodded to his left arm where it lay limp beside him. "Tie a tourniquet above the elbow with that rope. Cut the arrow loose with one of your knives, set my wrist, and then burn it shut with the other knife. Wrap it tight. We can put it in a sling later. The bonesetter in camp will correct it when we get there, so accuracy is not important now."

"Can you talk us through it?" Bergerum asked nervously, dousing one of the heated daggers in the boiling water and using it to fish out a steaming rag.

Gawain shook his head. "I won't be able. You two can do this just fine. Remove the arrow. Put the bones back. Cauterize. Wrap it."

Bergerum sighed his misgivings and got to work. The arrow had gone cleanly through, so removing it was not difficult, but it resulted in a gush of blood in spite of the tourniquet. He and Bediwyr rotated his wrist and manipulated the narrow bones back into kind of the correct placement, then Bediwyr held the skin closed and Bergerum burned it shut first on one side, then the other.

Gawain lost consciousness somewhere along the way. They removed the crate from behind him and lay him out flat, and examined the remaining arrow wound. It was, as promised, not too complicated, having slowed against his collarbone and not struck any significant artery.

With short, succinct communication, Bediwyr coordinated their work, using the blade of the knife to pull the flesh and muscle away from the arrowhead so Bergerum could extract it, then holding the flesh together while Bergerum dabbed away most of the blood and burned it closed.

They sat back for a long moment and regarded each other with gratitude.

"We're lucky to run into you," Bergerum told him. "He would have died."

"He still might. His breathing is fast and the blood came only slowly. We need to keep him warm and comfortable until there's better help." He stood up and dipped another towel in the boiling water, then offered it to Bergerum to clean himself up. "Take the mule and the cart. Go get your friends. I will look after him."

Bergerum cleaned up as best he could. "We are Fey."

"Obviously," Bediwyr deadpanned.

"The Red Paladins, the ones that shot him, are only a little way behind us. If they come here, they will recognize him and kill him."

"Oh?" He raised an eyebrow. "Then I'll make sure they don't come in here."

"There are fifty of them."

"I'll tell them he's got plague. And if all else fails--" Bediwyr patted the short sword at his side. 

Bergerum stared at him in awe. "You would fight fifty men for a stranger?"

He nodded. "I've seen a lot of battlefields. I've seen warriors and cowards, and most people are cowards. Most people don't carry their wounded comrade on their back. They don't approach a potentially hostile stranger for help. And they don't stay calm through a field surgery. Even if the patient is directing it himself-- fucking weird, by the way." He tilted his head forward at Bergerum. "You are not most people. And I reckon that means he isn't, either."

Bergerum smiled in gratitude. "Thank you. Thank you--!" 

"Go quickly," he directed. "Don't light the lantern in the cart. The mule will do fine in the dark."


	18. "I Can't See"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scene from the After The Fall universe, particularly for those who have read the Quality Flesh epilogue.
> 
> Special thanks to iwritemyownreality for working out the simplest and most elegant mechanism for temporary blindness.

The lower hold of the ship was completely dark. The night itself was a moonless hell so far out to sea, with no lights from shore and the clouds pulled over the sky. It was a terrible night to have to navigate. Luckily, there was no navigation required; they just had to sit and wait and stay out of the way until the crew decided what to do with them. 

Gawain sat in the dark with three others, whose faces he’d barely seen when boarding before the bosun took the lamp and closed the hatch over them. They were simply cargo, after all, and cargo didn’t need to see.

They worked out places to sit, and a hole in the side of the boat where the men could piss out of, and a couple of buckets for solids, and they tried not to move around too much. The hatch was locked.

After two days of the only significant light coming when the hatch was opened for someone to throw down their food and take away their shit bucket, someone began to cry.

“What’s wrong with you?” one of the other youth demanded gruffly.

“I want to go outside,” a small voice answered. The only young woman to make the journey.

“We will soon,” Gawain told her before the first youth could complain. “We’ve been underway for two days. Tomorrow we will be off the coast of Spain, and then another day and we’re in the Middle Sea. Just a little longer and they will let us out of here.”

She sniffled. There was a shuffling, and he felt her collide with his leg.

“Here I am,” he said, holding his hands out blindly. “I’m sorry. I can’t see at all.”

She found his hand with hers, and then followed up his arm to his shoulder. She edged over in the dark until she was pressed against his side, still holding back tears. “I can’t see either. It’s so dark. I just want to see the sky.”

He wrapped an arm around her like he did for his little sister when she was inconsolable. “It’s going to be fine soon. We’re halfway there. Think how brilliant the port will be. And the city beyond it. They say the city stretches all the way from the hill to the sea, and there are a hundred towers.”

“My brother is there,” she told him, calming down. “He’s going to meet me at the docks. He promised.”

“He’ll be happy to see you,” Gawain replied. “He’s probably beside himself for the wait.”

She scrubbed at her face in the darkness, then gave up and buried it in his shoulder. “He told me this journey would be dangerous and difficult. I didn’t think he meant we would be locked up the whole way.”

“It may be for our own safety,” he reasoned. “We would probably be in the way, anywhere else. Better here than getting knocked overboard, right?”

She giggled nervously. “Right.”

They all sat together for the rest of the night, and tried to sleep. The next day, by the reckoning of the light through the small gaps in the hull, the hatch swung open on time. But this time, instead of taking the bucket and passing down food and water, the sailor at the top of the steep stair gestured to them to follow. “C’mon up,” he shouted when they were slow to move.

Stiff from the cold and the waiting, they stumbled up into the burning light of the upper hold, blinded by the relative brightness of lanterns. Hands grabbed their arms and shoved them forward. 

“Steady on,” Gawain told them. “We can’t see.”

Voices around them laughed. “Don’t need to see,” someone told them.

“Probably better if you don’t,” another chortled, and others around them laughed along.

The door to the deck opened and sunlight streamed in, such a severe white glare that all four of them blinked and stumbled against each other, hesitating. Hands grabbed their arms again and shoved them forward, and without knowing where they were going, they struggled to obey.

“Stop,” one of the youths resisted. “Stop shoving, what is wrong with you?”

“Let me go,” another ordered.

Then it was Gawain’s turn. Large hands gripped his arms, pulled them out and bent him over a barrel filled with fetid seawater. He thrashed, kicked out, and shouted. "Put a sword in my hand and fight me like men," he bellowed at them, but with his cracking teenage voice he couldn't sound very threatening. 

More laughter.

"It's time to pay your way," someone told him, and struck him hard across the face. 

His face went into the seawater, and someone held it there for a moment before pulling him back up by the hair. He coughed.

"Struggle, and you go in the barrel. Hurt anyone, and we'll hurt you back." The captain's voice. "Piss me off, and you go overboard."

The crew behind them shouted and laughed and shouted lewd things. The grip on his hair forced him over the barrel again, then undid his belt, forced his trousers down.

He turned his head to the side, where the young woman who had sought comfort from him was bent over a barrel, terrified and crying. "Hey. Look at me. Hear my voice. They won't kill you. You have someone waiting for you. They won't--"

She didn't look at him. She didn't scream when they put their hands on her. She let out a short, shuddering exhale, then she pushed her face into the water and stood very still.

Gawain shouted and struggled, and tried to get to her. They pushed his head back into the barrel again, and when they lifted him back out, she was still face down in the barrel, but now a man with his trousers open was standing behind her. He shouted in outrage on her behalf, then on his own. 

He couldn't see. Or he couldn't remember seeing. Or he wished he couldn't see. But when he could again, they were tossing her body overboard.

He wondered if she had seen the reflection of the sky in the stale water


	19. Alt - Coma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ties in to a wide smattering of Arthuriana legends. No required reading, but definitely read everything anyway.

The night before the battle, it rained hard, like the sky was falling. The field would be muddy, preventing any charge on horseback, which was good because they didn't have many horses left but the humans were well-supplied. Merlin considered taking credit for the rainstorm, but it was all a matter of chance. At least this rain wasn't blood.

There would be enough blood tomorrow.

The Fey army was gathered in the woods, making their preparations for what would have to be the last fight. There were too few of them left, and the humans held all the lands and supplies. The Fey had withstood sickness and famine the previous winter and lost too many. If they didn't have shelter and food enough for this year, there would be no more Fey in the following spring.

But to their credit, they had gathered an incredible retinue of knights and warriors, magi and witches, engineers and sappers. If they couldn't take the castle and the city, they would blow up the castle, and watch the city turn against the church.

They had stayed clear of civilian murder in a fashion bordering on the heroic; Cumber, Wicklow, and Uther all tried to force them into killing peasants so they could build a reputation of the Fey as tricksters, thieves, and murderers, but Kaze and Gawain had advance knowledge of their playbook from Alexandria. They did not succeed.

Instead, they built the first disciplined, professional fighting force since the Romans withdrew. They swore their leaders to a code of conduct preserving life and dignity whenever possible, and encouraging good works. The people loved the Fey. 

Now all that was left was to take a seat of power and establish a permanent government. Kent was as good as anywhere. At least the weather was slightly better than the Midlands. 

Except for tonight, apparently. 

Merlin found the council tent occupied, as he had hoped. Arthur, Kaze, Bediwyr, Galehaut, Lancelot, Tristan, Percival, and Gawain were sitting in a circle around a lantern, passing a glass bottle of what was definitely grain alcohol by the smell. He smiled gently for the moment before they noticed him; the night before a big battle was always the same.

"Soldiers," he addressed them.

One or two of them glanced up. Lancelot and Arthur moved to widen the circle, so he could join them. Kaze passed the bottle to him.

"What's the game?"

"It's called 'why are we doing this,'" Percival snorted.

Arthur shook his head with a grin. "It's not called anything," he corrected. "We are talking over the reasons we took up arms in the first place."

Merlin scratched his beard. "Who's turn is it?"

"Yours, now," Tristan told him, taking the bottle out of his hands.

He considered. "I don't remember."

The circle erupted into boos and hisses.

"No, really," he spread his hands in a helpless gesture. "It's been  _ five hundred years _ . I don't remember. I barely remember a hundred years ago."

"Tell us why you switched sides, then," Gawain challenged.

He grimaced. "I was never not on this side. I just… didn't want to pick up the sword again. After what happened with the Romans and." He closed his mouth with finality in spite of being in the middle of a sentence.

Gawain nodded. "Good enough. Kaze?"

"First the witch kings came and tried to turn my queens into incubators," she scowled. "Then the church came and tried to kill everyone. Then they did kill everyone. But mostly," she accepted the bottle from Tristan and took a drink. "I took up the sword because I like to fight."

Bediwyr drummed his heels against the ground in approval. "We know Lancelot's sad story. Arthur?"

"Because I was the disgraced son of an indebted father," he shrugged. "And now I still am, but at least no one has tried to collect his debts." That earned scattered laughs and chuckles. "Percy!"

"Fuck off," he grumbled, then relented. "The paladins burned my village and killed my family. The Green Knight took me in, put a bow in my hands, made me his squire."

"Son--" Gawain started, voice strained.

"Yes," Percival confirmed. "Made me your son." He clapped him on the back. "I hope I never make you regret that."

He leaned to the side and crushed Percival in a one-armed hug. "I will always regret the situation, but I will never regret you."

A round of "aww" circulated. Percival's teenage sensibilities were offended, but he briefly returned the hug before struggling out of it.

"What about you," he asked, ducking his head under Gawain's elbow on the escape. "Why did you become the Green Knight?"

He took a drink and mulled over the question a moment. "The threat of extinction. Others made me into the Green Knight. I wanted to be a healer."

Bediwyr chortled. Lancelot punched him in the arm. "Ow," he complained.

"No, really," he laughed quietly. "I went to study in Rome and Athens. I… saw evil. And I knew healing individuals wouldn't stop it from darkening the whole world. I hoped maybe, if I did what I was truly good at doing…"

Lancelot reached over and squeezed his shoulder. "You're a fine healer, too."

Percival made a gagging noise.

"So you came  _ here _ to stop the world from darkening?" Tristan wondered. "Odd choice. It's never been too bright here to begin with."

"I came here to support Sir Kaze," Gawain replied. "She came here to stop the world from darkening. She's been trying to stop it since before I knew left from right." He passed the bottle onward. "And though I regret the circumstance, and I regret not being able to do more, I will never regret following her."

Kaze took a long drink from the bottle, emptying it, then tossed it to the ground and grinned at him. "Fool."

He grinned back.

\--

A whisper woke Gawain up from the light sleep he had managed to slip into. It started in his fitful dreams and continued when he woke, becoming a feeling like a finger pressed into the small of his back, urging him forward. Get up. Come to us.

He scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes and got out of bed, hesitated. The sword had been whispering to him off and on for months. He carried it on his back as a show of power, but never drew it, preferring the perfectly serviceable and un-cursed sword he always used. He knew what it was up to, making promises that weren't full promises.

But tonight's promise was very interesting indeed.

He pulled on his clothes and tied on his armor by low lantern light. His hand lingered over his own sword, and closed over it in the end, but it was the Sword of Power he tied to his belt.

He peeked into Lancelot's tent. He watched the Ash Man sleep for a few moments, wondering what could have been, if they'd had the time and peace enough.

He slipped into Percival's tent and left his sword leaned up against his son's bed. He pressed a kiss to his forehead and pulled the blankets up to his chin like he had when the boy was much smaller. He would grow into a strong, noble man.

They had both endured so much loss, he thought to himself as he left the camp and walked alone down the muddy road to the castle. The Sword has whispered to him of becoming king, of slaying his father, of becoming the finest swordsman on the island, in the world-- but tonight it promised him the lives of his loved ones, of his people, the security of everything that mattered the most to him.

And of blood, and of death at last.

When he reached the first gate, he startled the guard. "Open the gate."

There was a long silence and some muffled conversation. Then, "Are you surrendering?"

"No." He drew the Sword. Its whisper became an excited murmur in the back of his mind.

"Then why would we let you in?"

"Why wouldn't you?" He challenged. "I am one fey, and a valuable hostage. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And look what I have in my possession." He considered wryly that it could be he that the sword had in its possession, but this was no time for semantics.

Another pause. The gate opened.

The Sword said something. Gawain grinned a terrible grin. Armed men came to the gate to meet him, but he was already on the move, flying past them (through them) before they could reconsider and close the gate. Their blood painted the walls inside the gate before the first panicked shout and long before the gate crashed uselessly closed behind him.

He lay into every paladin he saw. Their glaring crimson robes were nothing compared to the red he spilled, the Sword singing in his hands. It tasted death and grew excited. It urged him on.

The paladins ran from him to the second gate, shoving and shouting in fear, begging for the gate to be opened.

Gawain considered the situation, and lowered the sword. He marched quietly into the throng of them and when the second gate opened, welcomed himself past it. With half a smirk at their stupidity, he put the closing gate at his back and began to strike out at them again. 

They screamed twice as loudly now. The paladins who had manned the second gate accused the first gate paladins of being cowards, of trucking them. The Sword whispered to them, and they turned on each other. Gawain might have stood there and watched them kill each other, but the hilt of the Sword was warm and alive in his hand, and it begged for more blood. He had no reason now to deny its wish. 

As they crowded towards the third gate, he paused. There was no way it would work a second time, they wouldn't open the gate for--

The gate opened.

He pondered their stupidity as he followed the dozen or so survivors past the third wall. He could feel the Sword acting against the weariness of his body, now; its heat radiated through his hand and wrist like a brand. Its voice reminded him that he was intimately acquainted with brands, and pain flared on his chest and arms. He grunted and raised the Sword again, and let it give pain to the enemy rather than to himself.

He killed every paladin between the first gate and the third, and the night on his side of the gate became still and quiet except for his breathing and the rain. The other side of the fourth wall was absolute chaos. He smiled up at the paladins on the wall. "Open the gate," he commanded. 

"He's mad," someone shouted in disbelief.

Gawain rolled his shoulders and stretched his back. The Sword's voice in his head was steadily rising to a frenzied scream, but he could only wait. Until it gave him a direct order.

_ Sky Man, raise me up. Call forth the sun _ .

"It's the dead of night," he scoffed. "The darkest hour."

The men on the wall panicked harder. Was this an ultimatum? An attempt to scare them? It was working.

_ Raise me up _ , it screamed.

He gritted his teeth in a terrible grimace and did so. His heart hammered so hard that he thought it might burst. The smell of ozone registered just before the Sword began to vibrate, first a flutter, then a buzz, then an arm-wrenching shake.

The rain stopped. A circle opened in the clouds, and sunlight poured through it, bathing him in a violently golden light. It warmed him and he felt it soak through his skin, flow in his veins. His armor creaked, tight around his shoulders and chest, suddenly restrictive where before it had been a good fit. He clenched his hand around the hilt of the Sword, now able to hold it steady, and it roared in joy. 

"Open the gate," he boomed again, picking the ties of his armor to loosen the chest plate.

The paladins screamed curses and panicked, scattering. The gate remained closed.

Gawain tossed aside his vambraces. This wasn't working. He strode forward and wrapped a hand around the iron bars, and distantly recognized that this was an insane plan as he casually wrenched the gate free of its settings and tossed it behind him.

Every remaining paladin in Britain stood before him now, with Cardinal Wicklow somewhere in it. The last obstacle to peace. To the safety of his family. To the survival of his people. It was a simple and frank realization, in a voice he was almost certain was his own: everyone in this fortress had to die. 

Including himself. For after he had done this thing, there would be no more Gawain in the husk of him, and only a murderer. He would take it over the alternative.

"By the light of the sun," someone was saying with his voice as they severed limbs and cut through bodies like they were nothing. "And under the sky."

He proceeded past the courtyard and towards the middle structure, the last hiding place. 

"Born in the dawn." He heard it in his voice but didn't remember saying it. He wiped blood off his face and found himself agreeing anyway. "It is a good day to die."

He was standing in the main hall. 

Wicklow was kneeling before him, the life leaking out. The Sword's hilt protruded from his face, having broken the top row of his teeth. The blade disappeared into his throat, reappearing briefly above his collarbone before disappearing again into his chest cavity, and reëmerging from his groin, point driven into the floor. He twitched, bled, and finally died.

Gawain planted his foot on the man-blood's shoulder and withdrew the Sword, then kicked the corpse onto its back.

_ Sit _ , the Sword commanded him, forcing his gaze to the fancy chair on the platform once reserved for the nobility who had held the castle before the paladins.  _ This is yours now. This and all the kingdom. I will give it to you, and to your progeny, and I will drink the blood of those who break your peace. A Pax Viridis, from Wessex to Orkney _ .

Gawain chuckled to himself wearily. "That is not what you promised."

The Sword burned in his veins, gripping his sword-arm in a spasm and causing his chest to seize.  _ The plan has changed. _

He grunted and surrendered to the pain for a moment, the Sword driving him to his knees. He tried to release it, but his hand would not obey, stuff around the handle. He rode out the pain until it stopped, and he was left panting and sweating.

_ Do not mistake my words for suggestion anymore _ , the Sword advised him.  _ I have equal control of your body now, and we will do as I please. _ The Sword forced him to stand, quite against his will and that of his exhausted limbs.

"I've been living in this cursed bag of meat longer than you have," he told the Sword, voice thin. He closed his left hand over the blade and squeezed hard enough to draw blood from his hand. "I've lived through more pain than your imagination can conjure, having never been flesh to experience the multitude of ways in which this body can come apart."

_ Stop _ , the Sword screamed.  _ I do not want our blood _ .

He laughed shortly. "But my blood is the last you will have." 

He ripped the Sword out of his seized hand, breaking his thumb and tearing it out by the roots, taking along a strip of skin and a spray of meat and blood. He threw it to the side, screaming as the fire in his veins flared up before going out, burning out of his flesh. His vision whited out, focusing again on the dimly-lit ceiling. He distantly heard someone whimpering in pain, but wasn't he the only one left alive in the castle? Then, at last, the purest darkness rushed in to meet him.

\--

The Fey awakened to the flood of unnatural sunlight pouring through the clouds at four in the morning. They gathered outside, some taking up arms and armor with the assumption that whatever it was, it probably heralded a fight.

Lancelot found Percival standing in his tent with a haunted look, a familiar sheathed sword in his hands. "No," he said before he could stop himself.

Percival nodded silently. "We should go after him."

"We must," he agreed.

They rushed out together towards the road to the castle. The other knights and Merlin fell in behind them, and they only slowed when they reached the first gate. The smell of blood and shit was overwhelming. They paused for a moment, taking in the scene, then worked together to lift the gate enough for Percival to slip under it. He made his way over corpses to the gatehouse and hoisted the gate.

They toured the carnage. The ground was thick with paladin corpses, many of them stabbed in the back. Missing their guts. Hands. Heads. Even Bediwyr began to look green. 

"He's not here," Lancelot announced, pointing through the second gate, where the carnage continued.

They lifted the gate again, and Percival slipped through to let them in. This time, they didn't bother to search for the corpse of a Sky Man amidst all the red-cloaked humans, but went straight to the third gate. Slipped through. And on to the mangled portal where the fourth gate had been.

Merlin bade them stop. "This is the Sword's work. We don't know what we will find. If we do find him, if there be anything left, he may not be Gawain anymore."

Arthur pressed his eyes closed for a minute, feeling sick. "I shouldn't have asked him to carry it for so long."

Percival stared uneasily. "What do you mean, not Gawain anymore?"

Merlin considered his words. "Sir Gawain did this under the influence of an artefact older than you can fathom. It was going to find a way to convince him to do its will eventually, but if it couldn't, or if it got impatient? It could have taken control of him by force. If that's the case, then it may have killed his soul so as to occupy his body." He sighed. "If he's inside and he's still standing, we must take the Sword from him. If he refuses, we  _ will _ have to kill him."

Percival stared at him a moment longer, then nodded. "If it's not him, then I will avenge my father."

Lancelot put a hand on his shoulder. " _ We _ will."

He nodded gratefully.

Merlin stood aside to allow Percival and Lancelot to walk beside him into the hall.

They found Gawain laying very still, covered head to toe in blood, covered in wounds from battle. But most disturbing was the scent of burned flesh and his flayed sword-arm.

Merlin's gaze immediately locked into the Sword. He pointed it out to Arthur, who threw his cloak over it and wrapped it tightly, tucked it under his arm.

The others gathered around Gawain, drifting between shock and sorrow. Percival knelt, curled forward, and rested his head on his father's chest, listening.

"Percival," Bediwyr started. "He's not-"

"Shut the fuck up," Percival shouted at him. In the stunned silence that followed, he was finally able to listen. He sat back on his heels. "He's alive."

Lancelot's eyes widened. He lunged forward, fingertips searching for a pulse.

"Boy, it's acceptable to grieve," Tristan told him gently, putting a hand on his back. 

"Get fucked," Percival told him.

"He's right," Lancelot confirmed. "He's alive."

"Hidden," Kaze swore. "Again?"

They sat together in shock while Lancelot and Percival peeled back his armor and staunched the bleeding from his most severe wounds. 

"We need to get him to a healer," Percival announced, snapping them out of it.

"The wound on his arm is of the Sword," Merlin informed them. "We need to get him to Yeva or Nimue."

"How far is the lake?" Tristan wondered.

"Less than a day's ride," Kaze reported, going to the windows and tearing down a velvet curtain to carry him on. "A little more for a cart."

"Let's hope he hasn't also killed the horses," Bediwyr snarked. At Lancelot's glare, he spread his hands. "What? There have got to be six hundred corpses here and he was possessed by a magic sword, you can't claim you'd be surprised."

Gawain had not killed the horses.

They managed to find an empty cart and load him into it. Lancelot, Percival, and Kaze climbed in with him, and the others took horses and rode back to camp, to report what had happened.

Gawain made no sound nor moved at all on the ride to the lake. Nor did he move or even sigh as they lifted him down from the cart and took him to the water's edge. He slept, and bled.

Nimue materialized out of the water as soon as the first ripple disturbed its surface. She regarded the scene with a sadness as distant as everything about her had become, since the Hidden had tethered her to the lake. "Is it over, then?"

Merlin nodded quietly. "The war is done."

"Our people?"

"Safe, for now."

She sighed, and lay a hand over Gawain's closed eyes. "The Sword."

Merlin nodded again.

"It was unmaking him. It was interrupted."

"What do you mean?" Lancelot asked quietly. "Please be clear. Will he awaken?"

"Maybe," she allowed. "I don't know. If he can put himself back together, he will awaken. If he cannot, then he will sleep until he dies. I can heal these wounds, at least, and maybe it will help him remember how to be whole."

Lancelot took his left hand in both of his and kissed his cold knuckles. "I will stay until one or the other happens." 

"We will," Percival told him.

He smiled gratefully.

\--

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

_ Who are you. _

Gawain shoved Arthur off his horse and into the river.

No wait, that wasn't right. He was too young. Arthur was older than him.

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

_ Who are you. _

He was kneeling before the king of the churchmen, being dubbed knight. His heart swelled in his chest. The golden trappings of Christianity bedecked the towering cathedral around him. Someone was speaking a prayer in his voice.

That definitely wasn't right. He would never submit to the man-bloods who had so destroyed his Lancelot.  _ His _ Lancelot. When had he come to think of him as his?

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

_ Who are you. _

Lancelot was fully armored, on horseback, standing ready on the bank of a river. A half-giant stood nearby, armed to the teeth but looking rather flabbergasted.

_ There you are _ .

Gawain ran, forcing his body to carry his heavy plate armor into a leap, higher than he would normally leap without it, but Lancelot was leaving, leaving again, and he wanted with all his heart to make him stop. He leapt to the back of the horse to sit behind Lancelot, and wrapped his arms around him, tucked his face close to his ear, and begged. "Stay. Please stay. I've chased you for so long."

Lancelot froze. His voice was stiff and cold. "I'll stay as you ask, but get off of me."

_ It hurts _ .

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

He was holding back an army of twenty thousand men. His side was withdrawing into a castle, the gates behind him. He was so tired. They were losing. Arthur and Guinevere were behind him. They needed him to do the impossible.

There was a knight standing on the other side of the moat, staring. He wasn't fighting on either side. 

_ Lancelot _ , he named him.  _ Help me. Please _ .

He collapsed, and they dragged his broken body into the castle.

_ It hurts. Lancelot, please. _

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

_ He's not going to save you. You have to save you. Don't you realize that yet? _

A brand seared into the flesh under his navel. The smell was sickening. He screamed.

_ Lancelot- _ !

He was locked in a tower. He got the feeling it happened frequently. He was waiting for someone in particular to rescue him.

Thump-thump-thump. Pause.

_ Stop looking for him here. He isn't here. Look for yourself. Who are you _ ?

He pressed the poultice to the young knight's wound and bound it tightly. He gave him a tea of valerian and burdock, and tucked a blanket over him. Gave advice in calming tones to the damsel that waited on his patient.

_ Is that you? Could it have been? _

He hauled another knight off his horse and tore a whip from his hands, a whip he had been using to lash at a young woman who could not defend herself. He kicked and whipped the young knight until he begged mercy, and forced him to go back to town to admit what he had done to the girl's father.

That looks about right.

He stood in his friend's house. His friend's youngest child pleaded with him. 'Flatten my sister's beau in the tournament tomorrow.'

His face split apart in a smile, and he had to catch a tear for how precious she was. 'Little damsel, I will flatten whomever you tell me to flatten.'

_ That's an interesting soft spot. Do you have any more?  _

A Kaze who was not Kaze was spitting abuse at him. Insulting his character. He was a sweet-talking whore who dishonored the court with his presence. A snake and a spoiled daddy's boy. 

And no one was defending him. No one stopped Kaze. And no one called for him as he turned and left. He was alone.

_ Stop. It hurts. Every version of me hurts this way. _

There was a pause. Then,

_ Ah _ .

He stood in front of an older couple-- the woman thin, red-haired, and wreathed in magic; the man dark and perilous and robed in black and ivory.

The man spoke, and it was the voice that had followed him from vision to vision. "It has always been us, hasn't it? The ones you're looking for in everyone else. Approval? Love?"

He tested his voice. "Just companionship. Not to be alone, as you left me."

The woman hummed and stroked the side of his head with one hand. "They can give you that if you let them, but not perfectly. They will fail. And as many times as you find it in yourself to forgive them, it will eat at you, until there is nothing left."

"If you can find that within yourself, you will survive," Not His Father told him in a fatherly tone he had definitely never heard in Lot's voice, ever. "If we are here, you are already trying."

"I don't want to survive anymore," Gawain admitted. "I want to die."

"They need you," Not His Mother told him. 

"They can need me, but I can't need them?" he objected. "That's hardly fair."

Not His Mother smiled sadly. "That's how it works." She gave him a kiss on the forehead. "You get to choose. But those are the rules."

He gave a shuddering, exhausted sigh. "Can I come back sometimes?"

He was sitting between Guinevere and Lancelot on a balcony in the sun, eating grapes and cakes and watching a tournament in the yard below. Lancelot said something sarcastic and somewhere behind them, Arthur gave a good-natured response that made Guinevere laugh.

_ To this _ ?

He was in a hall, tired and dirty and satisfied, back from a successful adventure. Wrongs were righted, innocents were protected, peace was brokered, and it was time for a meal and a drink with his friends. With his family.

_ Whenever you need. _

\--

He awoke in a wooden hut by the lake. Compared to the golden light of his dream, everything was dark and washed out of color. As tired and grey as he felt. He sat up slowly, stretching his limbs. He ran a hand over the beard that had grown on his face. Daylight streamed in from a single window covered in a worn cloth.

He stood up, careful of the lingering weakness in his body, and padded barefoot to the door. He pushed it open and sighed as the feeble sunlight washed over him. 

Nimue was standing at the shore of the lake, staring over the water. She didn't look over at him, but she wouldn't need to. She had sensed when he awoke.

He joined her. They stood quietly for awhile, looking at the dull world. "Where's everyone these days?"

"Carlisle," she told him. "Or Kent. Something with a K sound."

He nodded. "How long?"

"Three weeks," she told him.

_ And how long did they wait before they-- _

He didn't ask the question. The hurt was something he would have to survive on his own.

Nimue seemed to sense his disappointment. "They're mortal." She looked pointedly at his left hand. "Lancelot left you a token."

He held up his hand. On the third finger, a simple silver band glimmered, too bright for the dull world. "Oh," he said, and smiled.

Maybe he could survive a little longer.


	20. Betrayal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Contains reproductive discussions and infidelity

Gareth insisted there was something he needed to know about Lancelot. That Lancelot needed his help. That his brothers were about to hurt them both badly, going to pull the fragile peace down around them, and fracture the family they had forged together. Gareth was a sweet youth, kind and honest, all of the things a child of Lot had no business being. 

If it had been Agravaine, or Gaheris, or Mordred to tell him, he would not have believed it for an instant. But Gareth…

He let his younger brother lead him through the castle to a tower where they kept guests, when there were guests. There were not any guests now. He should not have heard sound from behind any of the doors.

But he did. And behind him, footsteps.

Mordred and Agravaine stood before him, and behind him was the door.

"Lads," he greeted warily. "Good evening."

Mordred set his jaw and lifted his chin. "Gareth, what have you done?"

"He deserves to know," Gareth replied. "And he deserves to choose what to do about it."

Gawain raised an eyebrow. "Know about what?"

Mordred frowned. "Lancelot and Guinevere."

"What about them?"

"They're fucking," Agravaine answered bluntly. "And it's going to destroy the reputation of the kingdom if they keep on."

"It should," Mordred added with all the confidence of a child.

Gareth shook his head. "Is it worth so much that you would reveal it to the entire kingdom, rather than accept it? Why not help to conceal it, for all our sakes?"

Mordred scoffed.

"I think you've made a mistake," Gawain tried not to laugh. "Oh, this is rich."

They all looked at him.

"Lancelot and I have been joined for ten years," he told them. "We've not told anyone yet, but we're… we're exploring magical means to, uh, have a child. He's simply not interested in women."

The silence in the hallway was punctuated by a long, very masculine, very familiar moan behind the door. Whoever it was, they were having a good time.

"Gawain," Gareth started. "I'm… I'm sorry." 

"Oh, don't worry," he said brightly. "I'm touched that you all are so protective of me. It's sweet."

They all regarded him with a kind of pity that he didn't have the ability to process. Instead, he took Gareth by the elbow in one hand, and Mordred in the other, and guided them out of the guest hall with Agravaine before them. 

"Let's all go back to the great hall, where it's properly warm, and have something hot to drink, and you can tell this old man who you favor for the next tournament." Let's forget all this, his tone said.

And he faked it very well. They sat around the fire and chatted for an hour or more, until Lancelot strolled by, and Gawain called out to him to wait, that he would join him.

As he did, the conversation around the fire died away, and he could feel their eyes on his back. He looped an arm in Lancelot's and steered him away from the great hall, towards the corridor that led to their private chambers. 

"Come with me," he urged in a whisper.

"Now?" Lancelot wondered. "I get the feeling you don't mean just follow you somewhere."

"Come with me _to bed_ ," he corrected, his voice betraying a little of his anxiety. 

Lancelot chuckled and squeezed his hand. "It's… a little early in the day."

"Magic doesn't know what time it is," he insisted. "I need… I need you."

"Well, you'll have to wait for a bit," he kissed him with too soft, too swollen lips. "I need a bath."

"Why?" Gawain asked too quickly. "What were you doing?"

Lancelot released his hand and stood back, studying him.

"I led them away," Gawain whispered. "They were going to kick down the door and confront you. Please, you must be more careful."

He swallowed. "Gawain."

"I wanted to be enough," he admitted. "But I understand if I'm not. We can work that out. But if they catch you, I can't talk them out of killing you."

Lancelot hovered awkwardly. "She… she must have a child, Gawain. For the succession. For the kingdom to be stable. Arthur can't."

"I know," he told him, hope edging back in. "She came to me, too."

He stepped back as if slapped. "Did… did you…"

"Obviously not well enough, since she came to you next," he reasoned.

"But did you fuck her?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Did you?"

Lancelot's frown deepened. "Gawain, did you fuck her?"

He held his gaze for a moment, but was unable to remain stony against his husband's clear, weeping eyes. In this terrible moment, he was too emotional. "No. I couldn't do that to you."

He looked relieved. As if he had any right to be. "Have I wronged you?"

Gawain crossed his arms over his chest. "Yes."

He reached out to touch his arm.

He took a step back. "And if she gets a child? And that child is your child? Is it what you want?"

"It's what we want," Lancelot pleaded. "She could have a child for the kingdom, and then a child for us. A more favorable agreement even than the Firstborn Pledge--"

Gawain held up a hand to silence him. "If we wanted a child from someone else, we have Squirrel for our son. But we're doing all of this so we can have one that is of us."

Lancelot's shoulders fell, and he slowly knelt in front of him. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to minimize all of this. You're doing such a brave thing. But I'm so afraid. Afraid for you. Afraid it won't work, afraid it will work and it might kill you, and--"

Gawain pulled him into an embrace, not sure if he wanted to comfort him for his fears or suffocate him for his infidelity. 

"I'm sorry," he repeated into the fabric of Gawain's shirt. "How can I make amends?"

He sighed, feeling tears soak through. "Stop the affair this minute. Go take a bath. Then come back to our chambers and let's try and try again, until it works."

Lancelot sniffled and nodded, squeezing Gawain closer for a moment before standing and moving in for another, less hesitant kiss.

Gawain turned his face away. "No. Bath first."

He nodded sullenly and did as he was told.

Gawain watched him go, his whole world a wreck behind him. He felt exposed and vulnerable, like a rabbit dragged from its warren into the daylight. He kept his arms crossed over his body protectively, and hoped to the Hidden that the magic never worked. He went into their chamber, and poured out the vial of potion Morgana had given him, and prayed it wasn't too late.


	21. Identity Reveal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: male pregnancy, infidelity

It was too late. 

Morgana confirmed it after a week of nausea. The course of magic and chemical tampering had carved a space in his body and made it fertile. With continued help, he would bear a child.

With continued help. If he stopped now, the seed would suffocate and die. His body would return to normal. He could just concentrate on the betrayal, on his own bleeding soul, on repairing things with Lancelot.

He had worked so hard and endured so much to conceive this child. His grief was temporary, but the promise of this new life would last longer. He would endure more to complete what he had started.

As soon as he began to visibly change, Lancelot couldn’t keep his hands off of his body. He hid the changes under loose clothing and armor, but when they were in private, he worshipped Gawain’s body like he was some sacred thing.

_I wish I were the healthiest maiden, so that he would love me for all his life and mine._

He wanted it to feel like love, but it wasn’t the same. He had wanted to be enough.

The rumors of Lancelot and Guinevere hadn’t stopped-- even though Guinevere was well aware of what was happening between Lancelot and Gawain. Of the child. It hurt twice. At least Gawain’s brothers had become more delicate about it, and would silence any hint of the subject whenever he was present. He was grateful. He was furious. He was heartbroken.

With Arthur’s cooperation, he packed some belongings and set off ‘on an adventure,’ some made-up mission for the kingdom. In reality, he retreated to a hermitage deep in the woods, where he could lay in some supplies for the last months of the pregnancy, then catch up on his reading. Escape from the court drama. From the rumors. Lancelot would join him a week or two later.

A month after he’d left, a message arrived. Lancelot had been caught with Guinevere in a state of indecency and driven out of the kingdom by armed men. Fled to Francia. The king was calling all his knights to pursue him-- but understood that Gawain was otherwise occupied. 

He burned the letter, and pretended it didn’t exist. It was time to enjoy a little silence. A little peace. To grow a child without the stress of the world upon them. He would live through this, and then he would figure out the rest. The only thing that could matter now was to get the child safely into the world. With a knight’s singular sense of purpose, he would approach this difficulty.

A month after that, when he was unable to do anything about it, Morgana arrived with the news of the rescue Lancelot made, and the death of Gawain’s brothers. She stayed with him as he mourned until there was nothing left in his heart, and then longer, until the child came. Until his body melted back together like it had never changed, never created the tiny life he carried in his arms. 

They returned together to Caerleon, the sorceress and the knight and the child in a basket. Gawain was treated as if he’d been gone on some mission and returned successful. He rejoined the affairs of court and the administration of the kingdom, the jousts and tournaments, the duels and trials. He raised his son alone.

A year passed, and then another. Arthur announced that he had forgiven Guinevere, and would welcome her back to court. He had found it in his heart to forgive Lancelot, too. They were both invited to come home. And they announced-- from two separate messengers, one from Francia and one from the ice kingdoms-- that they would. 

She returned first, and she accepted Arthur’s ceremonial forgiveness, and regained the throne. But she never apologized to Arthur. She only apologized to Gawain. She explained that she had been desperate to secure an heir, and knew that they had been using fertility magic. She had selfishly seen it as an opportunity. 

Gawain forgave her.

Then Lancelot returned. He apologized to Arthur first. Then he apologized to Guinevere. Then he apologized to the court. And then he sought out Gawain in what had been their chambers.

He knocked at the door politely. 

Gawain opened it. Stood in the doorway. Stared unblinking and unafraid and stone-faced into those ice blue eyes, edged and streaked with false tears.

Lancelot’s eyes were fastened on the ground. “Gawain, I--”

A tiny boy shoved past Gawain’s legs and crashed into Lancelot, catching hold of his trouser leg for balance. Gawain stooped and swept him up into his arms.

“Who’s this?” he wondered with an uncertain smile.

The little boy studied the stranger. The little boy with the faint butterfly markings on his face, ash-gray and intricate.

Gawain froze. Stared at him. His lip curled in disgust for a moment. He shook with rage in a way he hadn’t felt since the war. Since he’d stared down genocide. “This,” he replied icily, “is Galahad.”

Lancelot paused, turned his gaze to his husband at last. “Our… our son?”

“No,” Gawain told him, stepping back and closing the door. “ _My_ son.”


	22. Burned

The first time Gawain held the Sword, its touch was subtle, quiet, as if he had laid the palm of his hand on the surface of a perfectly still pool of water, and it hesitated around the contour of his hand, held back by surface tension.

The second time, he wrenched it out of Arthur's hand and flung it away, but the metal seared his palm in that split second. The wound bubbled as if it had been acid, not real heat, and maybe that was its trick. He pouted salt water over it and wrapped it in loose linen, and was careful to only handle the sword through thick leather gloves.

The third time, it sat demure in his hand, silent and compliant, not just a thing, but not hurting him either. Instead, it poked around in his head curiously.

_ We got off on the wrong foot last time,  _ it whispered _. My mistake. I see now that we could be good together. Very good. _

He sheathed it and tied it to his back, and did not answer it. Eventually the whispering faded into background noise, like the sound one hears before a bout of tinnitus. But the burn scar on his hand remained, reminding him of the danger he carried. 


	23. "Don't Look"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> War is hell.

He heard the child crying. The village had been raided and burned two days ago. The Fey Guard had been too late to even warn them. When they arrived, there were only ashes and scavengers. And the quiet, hopeless crying of a child.

"Hello?" He called, trying to keep his voice gentle. "Don't be afraid. We are Fey."

Bergerum heard him calling, but had not heard the crying. He looked around carefully, and called out the same in the Tusk language.

The crying stopped.

Gawain gestured for them to stand still and quiet, but it wasn't enough for him to hear even a sniffle. "Please help us find you," he asked. "We can take you to safety. If you are hurt, we can help you."

A tiny voice called out to them. "You are Fey?"

He breathed a sigh of relief, following the voice. "Yes, we are. My name is Gawain. My friends are here with me, Bergerum and Bate. Can you talk to us a little more? I don't know where you are."

"I'm under the table," the muffled voice told him. "I think… I think the table is under the house now?" 

They exchanged glances and followed the voice to a pile of rubble.

"I used to be upstairs in the loft but now I'm in the basement. I fell. I can't get out. My leg hurts."

They moved quickly but carefully to pull away pieces of thatch roof and thin wooden walls, until they could see a narrow, dark passage that was little more than a collapsed wall that had stopped on a stout wooden beam.

"We're coming to help," Gawain told the child. "We can help make your leg better once we find you."

Bate stayed him with a hand on his arm, passing him a rope.

Gawain tied one end around his waist and then knelt to survey the passage. It was dark, but enough light shone in from the outside that he was able to make out the confined space. He crouched down and crawled in.

Bergerum took up the task of calming the child while Gawain concentrated on not bringing the whole house down on top of himself. "Is there anyone else in there with you?"

"My… my momma was here, but I don't t-think… I don't think she's here anymore. She stopped crying a long time ago." 

Bate winced and made a 'stop' gesture as he fed more rope into the gap.

Bergerum grimaced. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"No," the child called. "I have a lot of cousins, though. Practically the whole village. Papa says they will have to look for a wife for me from the next town because everyone in this town is related. Even some of the ones who are married."

Bate snorted.

"I don't want a wife though," the child continued bravely.

"Oh, why's that?" Bergerum prompted.

From somewhere inside the rubble, there was a muffled thump, then Gawain cursed.

The child continued, less sure. "I thought I was going to be a knight, but… b-but fighting was really scary, and everyone is so big. I don't think--" The rope pulled out of Bate's hands, then there was a louder thump than before, and the child's chatter broke off with a scream.

"Gawain?" Bergerum called out. "You still alive?"

More cursing. "Yes. I… fell in a hole. I'm well, I just feel kind of stupid."

There were muffled voices as Gawain and the child spoke. Then the child whined, and the crying started up again, but there were promising sounds of movement, too. 

"We're coming out," Gawain called, then coughed on the dust. 

Bate began taking up slack on the rope, making sure it remained a clear guide to the outside. 

When Gawain, with the child clinging to his back, crawled on his belly out of the collapsed house, Bergerum and Bate closed ranks in front of him and helped the child up, but kept him in front of them. 

The crying child struggled to stand and look around, but they didn't let him. He pushed at them, upset. "Let me past. Let me see."

"No, no," Gawain caught hold of him, lifting him in spite of the kicking and struggling, and pushed his face firmly down into his shoulder. "Don't look. Don't look. We're going to safety. Don't look."

There was nothing to see but the wreckage and the corpses of the child's kin, torn apart by the crows and the wolves.


	24. Memory Loss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as the chapter for Buried Alive, and also What Goes After The Fall.

After the resurrection, it took some hours for Gawain to calm down enough that Merlin and Nimue were confident he could be alone and not do himself a harm. They let him alone in a small chamber in Rugen's system of caves, and took some time to recover.

"He doesn't remember anything," Nimue reasoned, slumping in her chair and wrapping her hands around her mug of tea. "So at least he doesn't remember dying. And… and what they did to him."

Merlin cleared his throat. "He just experienced an entire life as a tree. I don't think his memories are comprehensible, but they may still be in there somewhere."

"An entire life? He was a tree for ten minutes."

He tilted his head. "He experienced a different timeline. He was a tree for ten minutes here, but he lived for over a century there. Do you understand?"

She shook her head. 

"Hm. Imagine time is a plane which stretches in every direction, infinitely." He made a rectangle with his forefingers and thumbs. "This is the part where he was. When you locked his soul in the green, you dropped that plane and it folded up--" he brought his fingers closer together, "--and he dropped into that pocket. Time went in a different direction, and while he was in there, we continued standing outside of it."

"I… think I can picture it," she replied. Then her face twisted into horror. "Oh. Oh no."

Merlin grimaced. "It won't be easy. But as soon as he rebuilds his perception of the universe in the context of being… what is he? A Sky Man and a knight?"

"Yes," she allowed, not willing to invest effort into explaining to Merlin just how much he meant to the Fey cause and to her personally.

"In the context of a Sky Man and a knight, then. As soon as he is looking out of those eyes again, and comprehends that he must move and eat and shit like a Sky Man, then the rest of the memories will make sense enough."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "What have I done?"

Merlin gave her a sympathetic look. "What you needed to do."

\--

Gawain lay on the ground, his ear pressed to it. Listening. There was less sound in the room now, and no one was moving or touching him. It felt safer. He was still vibrating slightly with every movement of the thing in his trunk that was trying to escape, but which he definitely shouldn't try to help. Air rushed into and out of him, too, damp and strange. Parts of him ached and he felt like winter was reaching into him somehow. The thing in his trunk slowed finally; perhaps as the winter fell over him, it would hibernate and give him some peace. 

He vibrated harder. It was a strange feeling, and he couldn't control it. It became quite violent, and the stones in the gap where the air came in rattled against each other. Then almost as quickly as it happened, it slowed, stopped. He slowed, too, and the world began to feel more familiar.

There was a noise, and the loud, fast creatures from before surrounded him. He wondered if they would chop him up into another staff for the tall one. He didn't want to be a staff. A helpless noise came out of him.

"Shit," Merlin cursed.

"He's ice cold," Nimue reported. "What is he doing on the floor?"

Merlin made a noise in his throat. "The bed and chairs are made of wood. Also, trees don't spend a lot of time on furniture. I didn't even think of this." 

They gathered him from the floor and put him in the bed. Nimue spread blankets over him and held his hands in both of hers to warm them. Merlin didn't dare to light a fire in the hearth, but cast a spell for warmth on him. 

He shook for what seemed like forever, then he exhaled what sounded like a death rattle and closed his eye.

Nimue checked his pulse; her shoulders sagged in relief. "Sleeping."

Merlin sighed. Scratched his beard. "It will probably be easier to grow his eye back while he's in the arboreal mindset. He might think it more normal."

She raised her eyebrows, considering. "That's not a bad idea.” She placed a hand on the ruined side of his face and examined it. The vines that held his empty eye socket closed were thin, twined together in an intricate lattice rooted in what remained of his flesh. She covered it with her palm and closed her eyes, concentrating. She reached for the Hidden, and imagined Gawain’s eyes when they were perfect, greenish hazel circled with gold. She couldn’t help but imagine them surrounded by shadows, as they had been since their reunion. Under her hand, the skin rose up, rounded and perfect. She removed her hand and gently peeled away the tiny vines, lifting their little barbs away. 

His face was symmetrical and whole again, but still he slept. It was probably for the best.

She folded back the blankets and considered the vine-wrapped mess of his torso. Something moved in his chest when he breathed, something which was not his ribs. She watched it for a moment, then laid a hand on it, reached for it with magic.

It rolled under her hand, disturbed and disturbing. Gawain wheezed. Something else jerked in his abdomen, reaching through the wound in his side and out from his back. 

“What is it?” she asked, removing her hand. 

“The Hidden blessed him, in their own way,” Merlin answered without actually answering.

“Is it… going to go away?” she wondered.

He stepped closer, sitting on the side of the bed next to Gawain’s useless legs. He pressed a finger against the vine that penetrated him. It twitched against the intrusion. “This wound was made with fear. Then they dug something into it. A prod or a brand or something. It’s burned clear through with hate. I… can’t help him with that. But you might be able to restore his legs.”

“Me?” she wondered. “You can’t?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know him from the first Fey. You have a connection with him. It has to be you.”

She let him take her hand and place it on the green vine.

“You can do it. Think of him walking. In a better time.”

She closed her eyes and imagined when he taught her to ride a horse. He had lifted her onto the back of a patient mare, had walked next to her while she held tight to the saddle. He had run alongside them, laughing with her as the mare broke into a begrudging trot. He had protected and celebrated her, and she wanted nothing more than to disappear into that memory.

“Nimue,” Merlin interrupted her gently, taking her hands away. “Nimue, what…?”

She pressed her face into her father’s shoulder and wept.

\--

Gawain awoke. There was even more light pouring into his mind now, and he could feel his roots. How strange. Hadn’t he been uprooted? He wiggled them. Huh.

The weird loud flower was curled up half on top of him, half on the chair next to the bed. She was radiating a feeling like summer. It was nice.

“Warm,” he whispered, not really understanding how his face worked, but able to feel more of it. He startled. He had made a noise. A noise with his face. He put his hand on the hole in his face.

The weird flower moved, sat up. “Gawain! You’re awake!”

He blinked at her, trying to take in the details of her face now that he could see sharply. 

“Do you remember me?” she wondered.

“Remember you?” he echoed. He smiled slowly, wistfully. “I remember… you on the back of the sorriest looking mare in the village, clinging to the saddle and laughing so brightly. I remember you when you were small, and the boys were unkind to you, and you didn’t wait for me to defend your honor. You just grabbed a stone and started hitting them with all your tiny might. So brave. And I remember you swinging that sword, and you laid out on the cart. Oh Hidden. I remember you.”

She flung herself at him and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing into his shoulder. 


	25. Alt - Allergies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: kids.

He was young and stupid and his face was a swollen mess. His eyes watered and itched and burned. His throat was closing up. Was this love? Was this what love felt like? He hated love and he wanted to fall back out of it immediately.

He went to Lenore to ask how to fall back out of love, but he couldn't speak clearly enough. She busied herself crushing herbs and heating water, and she seemed in enough of a hurry that he didn't want to interrupt her. But it was really important.

He swallowed down the herbal tea she made for him, but refused the dried sinesis she was trying to tuck under his lip, pushing her hands away and trying to talk. "I hab do vall ouk av lurv," is what it sounded like.

"Gawain," Lenore huffed, "You are having an allergic reaction, you need this before the swelling gets any worse."

He blinked furious tears from his puffy eyes. "L'nor NO, Aimb ind LURV ang iks KILLIG BE. Aimb gurng t' DIEB."

She paused and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Ow do aib vall ouk av lurv?!" He shouted, frustrated. He was going to choke and die because he had been so stupid. Because the other boy had been so handsome and good at kissing. Because he was allergic to love.

Nimue poked her tiny head into the hut. "What's taking so long? G'wain promised we would catch frogs."

Lenore stood up and put her hands on her hips, frowning.

He frowned back obstinately. She was a healer, why wouldn't she just know what was wrong with him?

The patient and long-suffering Lenore raised one eyebrow. "Your brother is having an allergic reaction and won't take the medicine."

"Oh that. Nope," Nimue told her. "He is in love. He says it feels like dying."

Lenore raised the other eyebrow. "He what?"

"He is in love with that moonwing boy, Roje," she continued, seeming oblivious to his gagging noises and melodramatic sniffling. "He sucked face with him behind the bath house for a whole hour and now he's dying from love. But he shouldn't die, because he promised yesterday that we would catch frogs and he hasn't shown me where the frogs are yet." Nimue imitated a frog, hopping around the hut.

She turned back to Gawain and unleashed the full range of her eyebrows. "You're allergic to feathers!"

"AIMB IND LURV," he groaned. "AIMB GUNNA DIEB!"

"Well hurry up and do it and I'll tell Roje that you ran away from him and he'll hate you forever." Nimue smiled mischievously.

"ARGH," he fell over backwards.

Lenore took his distraction as an opportunity to tuck a thumb-sized bundle of herbs under his lip. "Chew. Swallow your spit but don't swallow the herbs. You stay here for the rest of the afternoon."

Both of the children whined.

"I mean it," she pointed at him. "You're going to puff up and be red as a strawberry, I'm sure you don't want Roje to see you that way. Nimue, keep your brother here. I need to get the water boiling for dinner." She left them, smiling and shaking her head.

Gawain stayed lying on his back, chewing the herbs and imitating Lenore's pointing and facial expressions.

Nimue giggled. "You're gonna puff up like a strawberry," she mimicked in a fake serious voice.

He giggled around his snot and tears and the herbs, and brandished Lenore's pointing finger at her.

Their giggles dissolved into a laughing fit, young romance forgotten already.


	26. Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as Buried Alive and Memory Loss, and the next two chapters as well, and also What Goes After the Fall.

Merlin sat in the room with a bottle of wine and a book, and tried to ignore the screaming. The book was really very good, and he didn't usually have time to read.

Gawain's mind was finding memories and storing them back where they had been, before Merlin and Nimue had turned him into a tree and disrupted the biological substrate of his consciousness. It would take a long time-- longer than they had, they needed to get back to the surviving Fey if they wanted to collect what was left of their fighting force and get the refugees to any kind of safety.

Merlin licked a fingertip and turned the page. Luckily Gawain didn't seem to be a particularly deep or complex fellow, just your ordinary, run-into-the-mill suicidal himbo. Otherwise he would experience his past in real-time speed, and they'd have to wait for whatever percentage of his life had been encoded to long-term memory, plus processing time as it filtered through other neurological pathways created by his brain's natural self-preservation mechanisms. And honestly, at that point they may as well just leave him with Rugen and get on with it, for all the use he would be.

Gawain's vine-wrapped form lay curled up on the hard bed that passed for luxury in Rugen's cave system-slash-palace. He had thankfully finished trying to dig his own heart out of his chest and calmed long enough for Nimue to agree to leave and get some much-needed sleep. Now he was clawing at the vines that sat anchored in his side, plugging the deepest wound and supporting his organ function while his regular complement of organs slowly grew back. 

"Oi," Merlin said boredly. "Leave those alone."

Gawain dutifully stopped clawing at the vines, but his glazed eyes rolled around the room, seeing things that weren't there. "No," he sobbed. "No no no no--"

The wizard swore and closed his book. There would be no concentrating while he was like this. He hauled his chair over to the bedside.

"Non, placet, non--"

He paused. That was unexpected.

Gawain continued to cry in perfect classical Latin, then in half a dozen other languages. Wherever he had been, there seemed to be something for him to escape. His fingers wrapped around the thin blanket that covered his bottom half for decency, and he screamed with his whole body until his voice gave out.

Thank fuck. Merlin dug a bit of candle wax from each ear and tossed them on the side table. 

The knight curled further in on himself, grasping the sides of his head, as if he could contain with his hands what was happening there.

Merlin considered for a moment that he was detached from this pain, but that this was an ally that his daughter was so loath to lose that she kept him from dying-- even though that was what he so obviously wanted for himself. If he stayed insane as he was now, it hardly would have been worth the effort. He reached out a long-fingered hand and, as gently as he knew how, pried his hand away and stroked the side of his head. "Hush now," he commanded awkwardly.

Gawain stilled and shivered for a moment.

"That's right," Merlin encouraged. "Bundle that up. Put it away in little boxes. We have work to do."

He gave a low, ruined groan. Something bright green and moving flared in the irises of his eyes, and his ragged breathing evened out. He muttered a name.

Merlin froze.

"Lenore," he continued muttering. "I'm sorry. Wasn't there. Nimue. Squirrel. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He continued down a list of names that seemed endless and heavier than stone, a list of names that crushed his broad, scarred frame into a tiny lump on the bed.

But Merlin couldn't hear him. He was shoveling memories frantically back into a little box of his own and trying to shove it back in the mental closet where he kept his own past, bricked up and plastered over by alcoholism. He clenched his teeth around the uncomfortable truth that he could now relate about this destroyed creature.

Just like Merlin, Gawain: the golden foster-brother of Nimue and celebrated Green Knight of the Fey, a savior and wall between them and their enemies, their leader and light in the darkness, wanted, with every fiber of his being, to die.

Merlin laid a palm over his forehead and began muttering a spell.

Gawain's eyes cleared for a moment, and locked with his. "Kill me," he rasped.

"No," he refused. "You live until we say you can die."

Gawain didn't even look surprised.


	27. Alt - Please come back

He didn't understand what was happening to him at first. Visions and heartbreak and so, so much blood flowed over him, past him. He was drowning in it. Something pierced his side, wrapped through him, and anchored him to the ground. It hurt. 

He felt his mind slipping in the blood. There was someone standing in front of him. Lots of someones. People he knew.  _ Die for us, _ they murmured.  _ Fight for us. We don’t want your healing, we don’t want your worthless comfort. We need your blood. Bleed for us. _

He opened his mouth to answer them, but there was so much blood that he choked.  _ I will,  _ he formed the words and willed them to understand. He was here. He would do everything that he could. They turned him around and put a sword in his hand and pushed him forward and the fighting began before he could comprehend what was happening. He did his best, his damndest, his all, but somehow blows slipped past his guard and into his tiring body. Blood poured out of him endlessly.

There was someone next to him, a fast, fluid, brutal fighter, fangs and blades and braids and death. Kaze. He almost let himself relax, but as soon as she appeared on his left, he realized that he couldn’t reach for her or call out. If he distracted her, they would both die. Other familiar faces closed ranks with him, and he willed them to see that he was struggling, to take over for just a moment so he could spit out this blood and catch his breath.

A blue shade slipped by, laughing. It made his heart light for a moment, but whenever he turned to look at her, she disappeared.  _ Nimue,  _ he mouthed through the blood.  _ Please come back. See me. Please. _

Another ghost breezed after her. Arthur? He paused in front of Gawain and pushed him back.  _ Don’t do this, _ he ordered.  _ It won’t make any difference. _

He tasted blood, swallowed around it and gasped, and almost reached out for him. But he left after Nimue and Gawain’s hand closed around the air.  _ Come back. Help me.  _ He lurched forward as a blade drove through his side.

A figure of shade and smoke stood so close to him, closer than anyone he could remember, blade sunk to the hilt in his body. He could almost hear him breathing.

Gawain tried to press closer, to feel the shade against him.  _ Kill me,  _ he begged.

_ No,  _ the shade insisted, withdrawing the blade and sinking it into him again.

He choked on the blood.  _ Kill me. _

_ No.  _ Withdraw, stab. Withdraw, stab. Withdraw.

He hiccuped more blood. Surely this must be the end. He couldn’t possibly contain this much blood. 

The shade kicked him and he fell on his back, drowning. 

Blood crowded into his chest and pushed up from his throat like a fountain.  _ Please. Come back. Kill me. _

A bright face appeared over him, admiring and youthful and excited, free of blood like nothing else in this horror was.  _ Green Knight, sir! You’re so brave! I want to be like you someday. _

_ No.  _ Gawain hiccuped on the blood and tried to scream. Tried to cry. No sound came out of him.  _ Please, no. _


	28. "You have to let me go"

They wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to a cart. There wasn't any more time to wait. They needed to get back to the Fey before their community splintered, and they needed letters written in Gawain's handwriting with Gawain's seal to get the refugees to safety in the north. And as hesitant as Merlin was to admit it, they needed someone who would be able to carry the Sword and not be overcome by its whispers of power and fame and status. Who else would be better to resist that, than someone who hated themselves so much that they wanted to die?

Merlin sedated him for the journey. It wouldn't do to haul a screaming Fey through the woods and bring the wrong types down on top of them. 

Still, Gawain twitched and writhed in the cart, whimpering and choking at whatever his broken mind showed him. Every few hours, he would reach a gentle period of memories, and fall silent for several minutes before his exhausted body caught up and dragged him to sleep. Then his visual processing would speed up in a REM stage, and he would struggle anew. 

Nimue fretted over him for the first day, until she exhausted herself and fell asleep in spite of his sounds. 

On the second day, Merlin fished Gawain out of the cart and helped him stand, made him to walk on his own into the trees to relieve himself, to drink water. 

When he tried to give him bread, Gawain pushed it away and curled over his middle, fingers brushing the vine that penetrated his side. "I can't," he refused.

"You need to eat, or you will die," Merlin explained patiently. "You are not a tree anymore."

Gawain's eyes fixed on something over Merlin's shoulder, then closed tightly, trying not to see whatever it was. "You have to let me go," he begged. "Let me die. It's time. It's time. Please."

Merlin slapped him, and forced the bread into his hands. "Eat." If he pressed some magic into the command, he would never admit it.

Gawain groaned, but he tore the bread into small pieces and examined it as if trying to remember how to eat. He finally placed a small piece in his mouth, uncertain about the entire process, and chewed slowly, then swallowed. His body seized around it, heaved it back up violently. The vine in his side twisted and squirmed in protest.

"Very well," Merlin told him, helping him balance against the cart. "No food for now. But you will have to learn to eat. She needs you. Do you understand?"

"It's time to die," he whimpered. "It's time-- hng. Can. Can you make them stop?"

He frowned.

"They're inside me. They're moving and twisting and they take up so much space."

"They're keeping you alive," he explained slowly. "I can't take them out."

Gawain reached out a shaking hand, then seemed to think the better of it and dropped it, wrapping his arms around himself instead. "Will they stop moving?"

Fuck. "No, they won't. Not until they're done. I have more sedative, but it won't make them stop. It might make you care less."

He shook his head, and sank to the ground. 

Merlin crouched in front of him and grabbed his face, forcing him to make eye contact. "Listen to me. This all seems very bad right now, and it is indeed in my top ten list of most fucked up things I've seen happen to someone. But my daughter needs you. Your people need you. You have a role to play in the years to come. And if I'm not allowed to fucking well die, then neither are you. So do whatever you need to do. Fake it, if you have to. But get it the fuck together." He gave his earlier spell a tighter knot.

The green that twisted behind his eyes flowed and tightened, blocking out the light. Tears welled up and threatened to spill, but then as soon as they had, they dried up. His eyes dulled. 

Gawain uncurled and stood. His head was still bowed, but he spoke again with a voice that was, for all that it was empty of tone and emotion, steady. "Yes. I understand."

"Go back to the cart. Lie down. Rest. When you are thirsty, drink water. When you need to stop, ask us to stop. No more of this drama. When you've recovered, pack this all away and deal with it after the war."

He nodded once, climbed mechanically into the cart, and lay down.

Merlin watched him twitch and shiver for a long minute, then went to attend his own business. When Nimue came back from the woods, she climbed into the cart and sat beside him. They set off again.

Nimue checked on Gawain from time to time, but he was either asleep or staring at nothing.

On the fifth day, he awoke, rose, attended mortal business, dressed, and sat on the driver's bench next to Merlin. He did this without comment, as if he had forgotten how to speak entirely.

"Feeling better?" Merlin wondered. "Or at least, does this kind of bad feel more normal now?"

Gawain considered for a silent moment, then shook his head.

"Still want to die?" He asked more quietly.

He nodded.

Merlin slapped him on the back gently. "Welcome to the fucking club."

[The sadventure continues in What Comes After The Fall]


End file.
